Cineplex is expanding its adults-only cinema offerings in Metro Vancouver.

The Canadian movie theatre giant is opening two new cinemas — one in West Van and another in Burnaby —  that signal its continued march toward more VIP-style service in the company’s expanding local footprint.

Cineplex recently announced plans to build a new 44,000-square-foot cinema at Park Royal shopping centre in West Vancouver. The new theatre on the south side of the mall will have 11 screens, including UltraAVX, D-BOX motion seat technology and three VIP auditoriums. Construction is to start later this year. 

Cineplex also announced plans to build another theatre, five auditoriums totalling 20,700-sq.-ft at Brentwood Town Centre plus Cineplex’s first Rec Room location in B.C.

The Rec Room concept includes live entertainment, several dining options, a bar and amusement games. Construction on the building is set to begin later this year with plans to open in 2019.

The new VIP cinemas are part of an shift in the urban movie theatre industry that is increasingly targeting adult crowds with the same movies, without children and with fewer — and more comfortable — seats, more food and alcohol options and higher ticket prices.

The VIP cinemas have assigned seating with reclining seats. Customers can order from an expanded menu with salads, burgers and cheese plates, and a beverage menu with wine, beers and spirits.  The cinema will also include a full-service lounge.

UltraAVX auditoriums feature a wall-to-wall screen, ultra-high definition digital projection and Dolby Atmos surround sound. The D-BOX seats move in concert with the action on the big screen with customizable seat settings.

VIP ticket prices vary depending on the location, but typically cost about $7 more than a standard ticket.

Park Royal has been without a cinema since the early 2000s, said Rick Amantea, vice-president of community partnerships and development for Park Royal.

“Going back 10 years, we’ve been looking at the latest and most innovative movie theatre concepts and we’ve travelled around the U.S. and points in Canada just experiencing and looking at them,” he said.

“We feel that the notion of the VIP cinemas … caters nicely to the North Shore market,” he said in an interview. “It allows people to have a more fulsome evening in terms of going to a movie, being able to reserve their seats, being able to have a light meal or a beverage before they go in, or after, or even during the movie,” he said.

During the planning, the number of total seats at the planned complex fell from about 2,000 to around 1,200, he said.

“Same square footage, same number of auditoriums,” he said. “It’s been a considerable reduction in seating, which from our standpoint, is good because it means less demand on parking and other things.”

He said eight of the auditoriums will be used for regular non-VIP service.

“We still wanted to have a great family experience so the other eight cinemas are more conventional in terms of stadium seating and all age opportunities.”

The cinema business in Canada has never been stronger, said Chris Wood, a principal with Northwest Atlantic Canada realty. “Like all retail, the theatre business has evolved significantly over the last 10 years,” he said in an email.

“Some single screen theatres have closed in Greater Vancouver over the past 10 years, but a number of multiplexes have opened, such as Marine Gateway, so I believe the number of screens and overall theatre footprint has increased in Greater Vancouver over the last 10 years,” he said.

The Park Royal deal was welcomed by the Squamish Nation, which owns the land at Park Royal.

“We welcome this project and look forward to the installation of a significant piece of authentic Squamish Nation public art in the mall near the theatre entrance which will celebrate its location on Squamish Nation land,” said Chris Lewis, a spokesman for the Squamish chiefs and council.

If the Park Royal deal happened a few years ago, the cinema probably wouldn’t have included the VIP service, said Cineplex spokeswoman Pat Marshall.

“It’s a more sophisticated experience,” she said. “When I first started going to the movies, we had a single screen auditorium and they would have housed 1,200 or 1,500 seats.”

Over the past 10 years, urban cinemas have shifted into anchor spaces at shopping centres, taking over the spaces of large, failing department stores like Target and Sears.

“Those are disappearing and we’re replacing them, not only with cinemas but with broader entertainment options,” she said. “We’re continually being sought after to be a participant in the development of these revitalization or expansion of shopping centres,” she said.

Cineplex has 164 theatres in Canada, with about 75 million customers annually.

Marshall said many of their theatre complexes occupy spaces up to 40,000 to 70,000 sq. ft, and each theatre is customized to its particular market in terms of pricing, services and configuration. “You’re not seeing the same theatre going into every location.”

evan@evanduggan.com

twitter.com/EvanBDuggan

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Defense Department has announced that it is paying $5.57 billion to expand the U.S. military’s arsenal of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters by 74.

The contract action is seen as an early stamp of progress for the next “lot” of planes, which the Defense Department Joint Program Office and defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin are negotiating. Joint Program Office spokesman Joe Della Vedova said that the round of planes is set to include 50 planes sold to foreign governments, bringing the total to 141 planes in this sales lot.

“We appreciate the actions taken by the JPO to ensure delivery of F-35s to our warfighter customers,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement.

What remains to be determined is the unit cost of the plane. Price disputes have derailed the program in the past, such as when the F-35 Joint Program Office unilaterally imposed its own pricing for the ninth lot of planes after more than a year of negotiations.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is designed to be the next-generation fighter jet that will replace the F-16 as the most advanced air asset of the United States and its allies. It can take off and land horizontally and can carry munitions inside the body of the plane. Its $400,000-a-pop helmet has an augmented reality display that gives the pilot a view through the bottom of the plane.

It is also the single most expensive military program in the history of the Pentagon, accounting for about a quarter of Lockheed Martin’s annual revenue and considered critical to its status as a top-tier defense contractor. A spate of program delays and ballooning development costs have made “the plane that ate the Pentagon” into something of a poster child for bureaucratic waste, drawing criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Then President-elect Donald Trump joined that debate before he was sworn into office, suggesting in a tweet that the plane should be replaced with Boeing’s cheaper F-18 Super Hornet. The Pentagon subsequently ordered a review to weigh the two planes’ competing advantages.

• North Korea accuses U.S. of risking nuclear war after Pentagon flies bombers over Korean Peninsula
• Fighter jets escort flight to Cuba back to Montreal after passenger makes 'non-specific threats'
• China celebrates as aircraft carrier arrives in Hong Kong for first port call

The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin subsequently agreed to sell the 10th lot of 90 planes at about $85 million per plane, a price that was roughly in line with what the Pentagon had planned before Trump took office. A Joint Program Office statement said the unit price for lot 11 is expected to be less than that.

Advocates of the program described the new contract order as a sign that the program is moving past its history of delays and false starts. Industry experts have generally credited the Trump administration with speeding along negotiations.

“The program certainly seems to be moving faster than it did during the Obama years,” said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant with the Lexington Institute, which receives funding from defense firms, including Lockheed Martin.

 

Predictive marketing analytics is gaining traction — and will continue to do so — as B2B marketers believe in the perceived benefits: increased program efficiency and returns on marketing investments.

As marketing matures, these predictive capabilities give B2B marketers insights into a company’s purchase propensity – including the individual members that comprise the purchase process.

When evaluating predictive marketing analytics vendors, be sure to ask these questions:

How does your offering turn predictions into actions?

• How do you connect or integrate internal and external data?
• How do you empower end-users to model?
• What recommendations does the solution provide to B2B sales and marketers?

How does your predictive marketing analytics solution increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of marketing programs?

• How does your solution measure results?
• How does your solution identify buyers that are ready, willing and able to purchase?
• Why are your solution’s segmentation capabilities unique?

How is your predictive marketing analytics solution more sophisticated than lead scoring?

• How does your solution align and deliver more targeted messages to each persona at each stage of the buying process?
• What firmographics, techno-graphics, business-buying activities, and social cues does your solution include and how does it internalize them?
• How does your solution incorporate machine learning to analyze activity on my website, other sites and social media platforms?

The top three areas B2B sales and marketers look for the impact of predictive marketing analytics on their business are:

Prioritization of leads and opportunities

• Minimize the energy spent on low-priority leads
• Maximize the time spent on leads and opportunities with a high propensity to purchase
• Identify and facilitate engagement into accounts that are not on the radar but should be

Hyper-segmentation – create homogeneous segments

• Focus messaging by identifying key attributes for each persona and buying stage
• Create relevant and meaningful sales plays for engaging dialogue
• Drive content strategy to focus resources on content that supports sales and marketing to attract, engage and drive opportunity through the sales pipeline

Marketing and Sales Prospecting

• Helps identify total addressable, served and target market – supports territory planning, ABM and demand generation
• Enables new market expansion – existing products in existing markets and new products in new markets
• Advances account-based marketing by identifying

Challenges for Predictive Marketing Analytics

• Data accuracy, quality, and capability claims by vendors
• Accurate, complete, timely, third party data
• A UX for sales and marketers to truly do model development and management exists in PowerPoint but not reality
• Perdition algorithms are still more focused on the “what and less” than on the “how”
• Successful implementations still require professional services or customer onboarding – a customer on the phone, video conferencing or on-premise dialog to make it work

Predictive marketing analytics is here to stay. While providers of Predictive Marketing Analytics for B2B marketers are beyond their infancy, it will still be a decade before these solutions are mainstream. However, B2B sales and marketers that harness the raw materials today will be those that advance their sales and marketing efforts to a level with a significant competitive advantage.

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What is an MQL?

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are leads that on the surface appear to meet all the attributes of a quality lead. A rule of thumb is that an MQL is someone in whom you would want to invest another marketing dollar. MQLs are identified based on the information provided when the prospect completes a landing page form or when they conduct certain behavior on your website or social media channels that indicates they could be a good fit for your product/service. MQLs meet your definition of a quality lead and are identified based on demographics, activities, and behaviors on your website.

One mistake many organizations make is thinking MQLs are ready to pull out their credit cards to purchase their product. MQLs are usually not ready to purchase and will require lead nurturing to move them through the sales process to determine whether they are sales qualified.

Here are 6 methods for generating MQLs through ungated content:

1. Turning Blog Subscribers into MQLs

Blog subscribers are rather easy to generate assuming you’re producing interesting content for your readers. A single form field on your blog can be an easy funnel to drive email addresses into your database. After these contacts have been receiving your blog, they are in a prime position for you to share your longer-form premium content offers. Since you already know these users, you don’t have to send them to a landing page to fill out additional forms. You could send them an email that takes them to a thank you page or ungated page where they have the ability to get a copy of your latest whitepaper without having to fill out a form.

Based on your MQL criteria, these subscribers who click through straight to your thank you page (instead of landing page) may be considered MQLs.

2. Pillar Content Creation

Another method for generating MQLs is by providing your premium offers in long-form ungated content and then offering your users the ability to download a PDF version in exchange for their email address. Another benefit, besides lead generation, of pillar content creation is that search engines are then able to crawl all of your ungated content, which could benefit your organic rankings and SEO.

3. Content upgrades

Similar to the pillar content technique are content upgrades. Content upgrades are typically found on long-form pieces of ungated content and provide a value-add related piece of gated content that is available for download. An example of this is if you’re reading an ungated guide on how to make cookies, the content upgrade could be a gated piece of content with 101 cookie recipes.

4. Facebook or LinkedIn Lead Capture Ads

One of the most effective ad products with the lowest CPA we are seeing right now are lead capture ads (though this won’t always be the case). Facebook and LinkedIn both provide a CPC ad that allows users to get a copy of a premium content offer by clicking on the ad and submitting their pre-filled information (based on what the social media network knows about them). Lead capture ads are as simple to use as the 1-touch ordering from Amazon. From there, the pre-filled information can be synced with your CRM and the user doesn’t have to fill out any of your forms.

5. Website Chat

Drift’s website chat product is making waves in the marketing world by pushing websites to avoid gating their content and instead capturing leads through real-time website chat. Website chat isn’t a new technology, but it can be an effective way to interact with users on your website who have questions and then more passively collect their information.

6. Retargeting Anonymous Web Visitors

MQLs can also be generated through retargeting. 90%+ of your website visitors are not going to convert. Retargeting through Google Display Network or Facebook ads is an effective way to drive this traffic back to your website’s ungated content or even retargeting them with a lead capture ad on Facebook or LinkedIn.

As more and more consumers turn to ad blockers and refuse to fill out forms, marketers need to be more creative to generate MQLs. What are some methods you use to fill up your MQL funnel?

What’s makes a great salesperson? Consistency. And this just gets more important when you’re dealing with a sales team.

This isn’t exactly news - I’ve written about it. So have these guys. 

Do you show up every day?

We expect people to say, “Fuck yes. I’m always hustling.”

But for many executives and managers, this isn’t an easy thing to quantify. Some overcomplicate the process. Others focus on the wrong metrics. (We've put together a sales management toolkit with templates, checklists, and more to make managing a sales team easier for you. Download it here for free.)

So what’s the best way to measure sales consistency?

Identify the metrics that matter:

First, figure out exactly what you’re going to measure. I’d keep my eye on:

• Activity: How many calls are made? How many emails are sent?
• Quality: What’s the reach rate? What’s the open rate?
• Conversions: How many demos have been scheduled? How many free trials registered? How many deals closed?

Track individual sales activity

By studying the number of calls, responses, minutes per call, and conversions, you’re able to establish baselines of consistency for each of your salespeople.

Once those baselines are set, you can effectively weigh performance data and work towards solutions to get low-performing salespeople back on track.

Track team sales activity

When you develop a high-level understanding of your team’s sales activity for a given period of time, it’s easier to plan for long-term growth. It also provides an opportunity to compare an individual’s performance to the team’s performance.

Okay, this is all good stuff, but what does activity tracking actually look like?

Here’s a quick example:

With Close.io, you can generate detailed activity reports for individuals and your entire team.

Want to know how many calls I made from July 31 to August 5? Want to know how that compares to Walter, Samantha, and Philip? The answers are right in front of you.

Why is this important?

Charts and graphs help us visualize data. They’re a quick way to analyze and compare multiple pieces of information at once. The peaks and valleys prove how consistent we’ve been over the course of a week, month, or year.

What else can activity reports tell me?

Let’s use the graph above to discuss an imaginary world in which I only make 10 calls a day. For now, we’ll focus on Walter, since this is already a little weird for me.

 Because you—the sales manager—have a high-level understanding of our team’s performance, you know that Walter typically averages 12 calls per day. This week, however, he’s only making 4-5 calls per day. After looking at the data, you have two options:

1. Chalk it up to a bad week - even Jordan had shooting slumps
2. Assess the situation and strategize ways to improve his performance

 As you prepare for a conversation with Walter, you gather more data. First, you select another metric—minutes per call—and generate a report. At the end of the graph, you notice a pretty significant spike.

Here’s what you learn: From July 31 to August 5, Walter spent an average of 14 additional minutes per call.

Next, you check out his conversions and find that he also secured 5 more demos than any other 6-day span.

That drop in calls isn’t such a big deal, right?

When you ask him what he’s doing differently, there’s a simple answer: he’s using more open-ended questions on calls. This keeps prospects on the line, so he’s able to walk them through more steps in the sales process.

Because Walter consistently makes 12 calls per day, any deviation from that pattern tells you that there’s something—good or bad—worth investigating.

So what’s the lesson? Consistency provides activity data. Activity data leads to actionable insights. And actionable insights close more deals.

To learn more about how our reports promote sales consistency, check out our reporting feature or sign up to start your 14-day free trial.

They have 1.25+ million paid users. Their trial to paid conversion rate is sitting at 30%.

There’s just no better way to put it: Slack is absolutely kickin’ ass in the SaaS world.

But they don’t need me to tell the world how well they’re doing. Just look at their stats:

• They are the fastest growing SaaS company. Of all time.
• They have gone from being valued at $0 to $4 BILLION. In just 4 years.
• They are adding $1 million in new contracts. Every. 11. Days.
• They have 77% of the Fortune 100 using their software.
• They have 4 million active daily users.

Growth chart for Slack’s active daily users [Source]

Oh, and did I mention they did ALL of this without a million-dollar marketing technique, a fancy email strategy, or a pushy outbound sales team?

Actually, it wasn’t until recently that Slack even bothered hiring salespeople and they managed to become a $1.1 billion company before bringing on a CMO.

So, how did Slack actually do it?

Let’s find out.

Navigate this Post

• Overview of Slack’s Strategy
• Traffic profile for Slack.com
• Top performing organic traffic
• Top performing referral traffic
• Traffic profile for SlackHQ.com
• Top performing Medium articles
• Top performing paid traffic
• Landing page breakdown
• Top performing social media traffic
• How Slack Converts 30% Of Their Free Users To Paid Users
• 9 Key Takeaways from Slack’s Billion-Dollar Success

Overview of Slack’s Strategy

Before we talk about Slack’s overall strategy, we first have to talk about its astonishing initial growth.

A tweet by Marc Andreessen on Feb 10, 2014 [Source]

Most of Slack’s initial growth was thanks to word-of-mouth marketing (and actually, even today this continues to be Slack’s #1 priority).

The initial word-of-mouth spread is partially attributed to Slack’s famous founder, Stewart Butterfield and partially attributed to Slack’s amazing product-market fit.

Before Slack, Butterfield was well-known as the founder of the photo sharing platform Flickr that was acquired by Yahoo! in March, 2005.

As expected, Butterfield (and the core team largely drawn from the founders that created Flickr) had the benefit of a lot of contacts, including those in the media, that they could leverage to get the word out. These connections obviously paid off – 8,000 people signed up on Slack’s very first day and two weeks later, that number had almost doubled.

Interestingly, Butterfield launched one project before Slack (a computer game called Glitch) which launched in September 2011 but closed down just over a year later in November 2012 due to not being able to attract an audience large enough to sustain itself.

This is living proof that no matter how good your connections are and how great your product is, if it doesn’t meet the needs of the market, it will fail.

Butterfield learnt from his failure and his second project (Slack) found product-market fit instantly. Slack now continues to rely heavily on word-of-mouth marketing and on brand building to generate organic views to their website.

They focus heavily on a few core marketing channels, such as social media and a Medium publication, that help them continually get their name out there. Plus, they’ve managed to define a distinctive brand voice that is personal, memorable, and entertaining.

But to amplify this organic traction, more recently, they’ve ramped their PPC advertising.

Traffic Profile for Slack.com

The above image shows Slack’s public facing main site. As you can see, the majority of Slack’s traffic comes from direct sources…meaning 91.35% of those 108.6 million monthly visitors are going to the website directly (BTW: 108M+ monthly visitors is 5x HubSpot’s 20M+).

But given that Slack has 4+ million daily active users, a very high percentage of this traffic is likely users heading to the website to login into the app.

This high amount of direct traffic can also be attributed to that ultra-powerful word-of-mouth awareness that Slack has worked so hard to achieve. In other words, since so many people already know Slack by name, they just type Slack.com directly into the browser.

Beyond the direct traffic, there are a few other tricks of the trade that Slack is using to get organic traffic – organic search and referrals.

Top Performing Organic Traffic

Based on Slack’s organic search results, they have 638 keywords that rank on the first page of Google, and 345 that rank on the first page of Bing/Yahoo!.

This number of first page ranking keywords is significantly lower than what you find with many other high-performing SaaS companies. When I analyzed HubSpot here, for example, I found that HubSpot has an impressive 5,905 first page keywords on Google and 10,440 on Bing/Yahoo!.

But there’s a pretty easy answer for this disparity. Unlike HubSpot, which puts a lot of effort into building up their SEO through content marketing, Slack has adopted different methods.

So while HubSpot will show up for search phrases like “how to use Excel” because they wrote a blog post on the topic, Slack hasn’t created any content marketing articles for the express purpose of SEO and organic traffic.

Instead, a big part of Slack’s organic SEO success comes from Slack’s App Directory landing pages.

Here is a table that’ll give you an idea of how this works. It’s an overview of some of Slack’s top organic keywords with the highest global monthly search volume by rank on the first page of Google. All the organic listing links drive traffic to one of Slack’s App Directory landing pages.

As you can see here quite obviously, the people who type in these keywords aren’t specifically searching for Slack. Yet, people who search for these other products often see Slack’s website. Why?

Well, the first thing to note is that each and every one of these are products that have integration capabilities with Slack. So, Slack took advantage of this to make sure they often end up on the first page search results whenever anyone searches a product with which Slack integrates.

To do this, Slack has an individual landing page for each of their integrations. Some are created by App Directory Partners, while major integrations are often created by Slack themself.

For Slack created integration webpages, each webpage follows the same simple 3-part sequence for their SEO strategy:

1. The name of the integration in the webpage’s headline
2. One sentence explaining what the integration is
3. One sentence explaining how the integration works with Slack

Here’s an example of what this looks like for the integration with Pingdom:

Take note, the smart folks over at Slack know that having an App Directory is critical to their long term success. Why? Because the more integrations people add to their Slack, the more “sticky” they will become as their entire working life becomes fully integrated with Slack.

Slack literally becomes (as their slogan so aptly describes) “Where work happens.”

Though Slack’s “integration page SEO” keywords are obviously very powerful for SEO and product stickiness, here are the keywords that really bring the most amount of traffic to Slack:

What sticks out to you? The word ‘Slack’ shows up in every single one!

Even the fifth organic keyword is just the word “Slack” in Japanese. Japan is Slack’s biggest market outside the United States (see proof below).

Slack’s traffic profile by country

Slack’s other top keywords, beyond the branded ones, usually relate directly to their product offering (ie: messaging, team communication, etc).

This all goes back to Slack’s awesome word-of-mouth brand awareness. Because of it, Slack doesn’t need to put huge amounts of focus on content marketing or their SEO – their brand name and product offerings do a lot of the work for them.

Top Performing Referral Traffic

Now let’s take a look at Slack’s referral traffic. Referrals make up 3.34% of Slack’s total traffic, and here are Slack’s top 5 referrers:

Of all these referrers, the second and third are the most interesting: GitHub and Trello.

As we just discussed above, Slack has a ton of integrations. And two of these are – you guessed it – GitHub and Trello.

If I click on the GitHub link in that referral image above, I end up on a GitHub page explaining how Slack and GitHub can be integrated.

And if I click the Trello link, I end up on a similar integration page on Trello’s website:

At first glance, it might not seem like the clicks from these two referrals are all that significant. After all, combining these GitHub and Trello pages only account for 9.84% of all referral traffic, and referral traffic only brings 3.34% of Slack’s total traffic.

But even though these percentages may seem small, you first need to take into account the sheer number of visitors to Slack every month (108.6 million!).

And if you consider the percentages above out of Slack’s total monthly visitors, the numbers actually look pretty good. GitHub alone brings Slack approximately 200,000+ clicks monthly and Trello brings them 150,000+. Not bad for something Slack doesn’t really have to do much for.

Slack’s not the first company to accelerate growth via integrations. One strategic integration is part of what helped YouTube get so big, so fast.

Back when YouTube first began in 2005 as an unknown company, they integrated with MySpace, thus tapping into the 25 million unique users MySpace had at the time, without having to seek these visitors out themself.

Essentially, integrations let you piggyback off the success of another platform.

Slack has 1,000+ integrations (231 alone just in Bots apps) – meaning they are reaping A LOT of benefits and extra traffic because of them.

And of course, the fourth referrer is Slack’s Medium publication. Their Medium publication brings an extra 76,063 interested visitors to their main site every month.

On that note, let’s move on to analyzing Slack’s Medium publication.

Traffic Profile for SlackHQ.com (Slack’s Medium Publication)

SlackHQ.com, also called Several People Are Typing – The Official Slack Blog is Slack’s Medium publication. As you can see, the traffic sources here are quite different from their main website.

After direct traffic, the second largest driver is search clocking in at 11.45%. If you look at the organic search terms below, you can see that the top keywords are all branded.

When you approach Slack’s main page, the link to the blog isn’t very obvious:

This accounts for the high number of people searching for the phrase “slack blog” (after all, what kind of big business doesn’t have a blog?).

The middle 3 keyword phrases from their Top 5 Organic keywords above are customer search queries and questions about their product that Slack knew were common and thus decided to write articles on.

Here are the 3 specific pages generating that traffic on the SlackHQ Medium publication:

• slack bot tutorial: A beginner’s guide to your first bot
• slack meetings: Meetings that work (and don’t) in Slack
• slack status: Set your status in Slack

This gives Slack a clever way to provide customers with more product info without just referring them to a boring “help” page.

As far as referrers go, it’s interesting to note that not one of the top referrers is the Slack website itself. This is probably due to how discrete the blog link is on Slack’s main website.

On Slack’s main website they have strategically moved all distractions to their footer (blog, podcast, app directory, etc). This puts more focus on converting visitors into freemium users.

Over 50% of the referring traffic to Slack’s Medium publication comes from Medium itself, as Slack has a strong Medium presence with over 125,000 followers and is featured first on the Medium Brands page.

The page, pictured above, accounts for 7.27% of SlackHQ’s referral traffic, but where is that top 47.54% of Medium referral traffic actually coming from? Answer: Medium’s homepage in the ‘Popular On Medium’ section and the ‘Medium Daily Digest’ email.

By really finding their voice and tapping into the type of personal and real-life articles that perform well on Medium, Slack often find itself on Medium’s ‘Popular On Medium’ section or featured in the Daily Digest email that Medium sends to its subscribers.

How can you do the same?

Build your Medium following and publish articles that Medium’s algorithm loves (ie: high read ratio, high amount of recommends, high comment count, etc…basically everything that comes to you when you create really good content).

Part of Slack’s major success with Medium is that they already had a large audience to market to. In fact, back when they began their publication in August 2014 with an article titled “11 Useful Tips for Getting the Most of Slack,” it was recommended 1,024 times…even though it was their first article ever!

How did Slack manage to get this much engagement on their very first article? Well, one theory goes back to a feature that makes Medium an awesome marketing tool: it lets you bring your followers from another platform.

In other words, if you sign up with Medium through either Twitter or Facebook, Medium will automatically import all of your followers that already have a Medium account.

And as you’ll see in our social media analysis below, Twitter has been the backbone of a lot of Slack’s success and customer interaction. So, Slack probably leveraged this by signing up with Medium through their Twitter account to quickly reach their first 100,000 Medium followers.

Beyond Medium itself and Twitter, there is one last referrer (the fifth one) to SlackHQ that is worth talking about because companies don’t often realize its viral marketing potential: Hacker News.

People often post Slack’s articles there, opening them up to extra interest, views, and engagement. When this happens Hacker News can quickly jump to Slack’s #1 referral traffic source in any given month.

Top Performing Medium Articles

Slack’s Medium publication is a combination of product updates and tutorials, practical workplace tips, and personal stories.

This combination helps Slack:

• Generate an extra 70,000+ viewers to their main website monthly
• Keep their current customers in-the-know or encourage potential prospects with Slack updates and improvements
• Connect with their readers (whether they are already users or not) and continue building their brand name with their unique customer voice

As you’ve seen from the SlackHQ.com traffic profile above, Slack does quite well for itself on Medium (500,000+ monthly website visitors).

Here are the exact Medium posts that have done the best according to social engagement:

The top post is an excellent showcase of Slack’s distinctive, unique brand voice (but we’ll chat about this one in the “Top Performing Paid Traffic” section later in the article).

The middle two are articles about Slack product updates. Take note of how Slack demonstrates their awareness of the importance of their own brand name: each title actually begins with the word “Slack.”

The final top performer is a personal, relatable, story-based article written by an outside author.

The calls-to-action (CTAs) on most of Slack’s Medium articles are some variation of opening up a dialogue with their customers by asking them to reach out with questions or suggestions.

They also always link to their Twitter page in the CTA (you can see why in the screenshot below).

At the end of articles about product updates, the CTA often links readers to more product related information and gives a few links to other product updates they think their readers might like to know about.

For personal, story-based articles, there’s no CTA at all: just an image and blurb about the guest author.

One more thing to note is that Slack runs their blog solely on Medium and doesn’t have their own blog outside of it. More and more companies are doing this, finding Medium to be a great platform that can open them up to a whole new potential audience that they might not reach otherwise.

Top Performing Paid Traffic

Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield has openly admitted that paid marketing hasn’t been his priority nor his main traffic driver for Slack.

A tweet by Stewart Butterfield on Mar 16, 2016 [Source]

Yet, paid marketing still plays a pretty big role in Slack’s success, accounting for nearly 400,000 website views monthly.

These are the top performing ads for the 2,100 PPC keywords Slack is bidding on:

As you can see, every single one of these ads has the word “Slack” and the word “Team.”

Each headline also contains one of the following 3 words: “Communication,” “Collaboration,” or “Messaging.”

The ad copy varies between benefit-driven (ie: fewer meetings, less internal email, all your tools integrated) and feature-driven (ie: real time messaging, file sharing, and powerful search).

Clicking on any of the top performing ads will bring prospects to one of two places: Slack’s homepage or Slack’s product page.

Here’s the entire paid search funnel for ads that direct prospects to the product page:

As you can see, they are using a single landing page for a lot of different keywords. Usually, a company would create several different landing pages based on the searcher’s keyword intent, but this particular landing page must be working well enough for Slack that they can just direct all of them here. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk about why this is a good landing page in the upcoming “Landing Page Breakdown” section).

You can see that most of the keywords are some variation of “collaboration”, “messaging” or “communication.” Slack has the challenge (or the benefit, depending on how you look at it), of having to appeal to a wide audience. But clearly, Slack has found three words that seem to have universal appeal, no matter who’s searching.

You’ll also see that there are a few competitor branded keywords (ie: “office 365 instant messaging”).

As far as I could tell, Slack isn’t investing in retargeting ads. Per this discussion in 2015, they weren’t. And I haven’t found anything implying they are now:

A tweet by SlackHQ on Mar 19, 2015 [Source]

In general, it’s safe to say that Slack’s focus with their advertising has been more on brand building than anything else. This means they’ve also experimented with some more ‘traditional’ forms of advertising to help get their name out:

A tweet by a Slack Account Executive on May 22, 2017 [Source]

One of Slack’s most memorable ventures into traditional advertising happened when they took out a full-page ad in the New York Times.This ad served as a challenge to Microsoft, who was soon to launch their own competing product.

A tweet by Stewart Butterfield on Nov 2, 2016 [Source]

Slack then sensibly published the whole ad on their Medium publication, thus providing them yet another outlet to get their name out and spread the word. Clearly, it worked. If you look back to our analysis of their top performing Medium articles above, you’ll notice that this article snagged the top spot with 14,600 shares.

You can find the whole letter on Slack’s Medium publication here.

I can’t say for sure whether or not this ad brought more paying customers, but it sure got a lot of media attention and probably created some loyal fans.

Landing Page Breakdown

As mentioned above, Slack only has 2 landing pages that they currently use for their paid ads – either their homepage or their product page.

Most companies have many landing page options to cater to different audience members, search keywords, and product offerings. But since Slack caters to such a wide audience; gets traffic primarily through branded keywords, and only has a single product offering, they can get away with so few.

There’s not too much to say about the homepage, so let’s look at that first.

This is what a viewer will see above-the-fold if they end up on Slack’s homepage.

It’s short, sweet, and simple. There’s really not much to it: Slack’s motto, their unique selling proposition (USP), and a big green CTA calling on their audience to “Get Started.”

This is the page they direct people to who find them via branded keywords:

After all, if someone already knows enough about Slack to type their brand name directly into the search bar, you hardly need to overwhelm them with extra info or a full-fledged sales page. Really, all they need is an easy next step. In this case, clicking the “Get Started” button.

On the homepage, the audience can get a bit more info if they scroll down.

But by making this section (pictured above) not stand out, it prevents the reader from getting distracted and instantly draws their eyes to the CTA button as the only logical next step.

Beyond the homepage, Slack also uses their Product page as a landing page. Interestingly enough, this isn’t a special landing page that can only be found by clicking on a paid Slack ad. You can actually find it by clicking on the “Product” text link in their website footer or top navigation.

Though the Product page is certainly longer than the homepage, it is by no means text heavy; instead, it revolves around colorful and appealing visuals.

Let’s break down the page scroll-by-scroll to see what’s going on.

To start, here’s what the landing page looks like above-the-fold:

1. A prominently displayed video is the first thing a person sees. If I were to “Watch the tour,” I’d get an overview of Slack’s main benefits to see how it actually works.

2. A simple, concise description of what Slack offers. Bad team communication is a pretty universal pain point, so it’s good to give the audience a reminder of what Slack does early on.

3. A quick breakdown of Slack’s 3 core features, where the right side of the page changes based on which arrowed section I click on above. The changing image is not only visually appealing, but also promotes more interaction with the page.

4. After reading about some of Slack’s features in #3, you’ll find the benefits in #4.

Now, you may be wondering why Slack discusses features, instead of benefits, first. Well, if you were to just look at Slack’s benefits above without any knowledge of what Slack does in the first place, would you be impressed? No! Likely, you’d just sit there scratching your head and asking what Slack even does.

But, by first making sure the audience actually understands what Slack is and what it does with the short feature descriptions and images in #3, the audience is able to fully appreciate the benefits of #4.

5. Another benefit. This time showing off Slack’s practicality and ease-of-use with fully native iOS and Android apps. No one likes transitioning to a new software or program, so making prospects feel like transitioning to Slack is an easy thing to do will help.

6. Overcoming a common objection. Slack let’s people know they can customize their notifications, to overcome a common objection people have of getting ‘too many annoying notifications’.

7. A section on the page to filter large enterprise leads to their Enterprise page.

8. Another benefit.

9. Addressing a major audience pain point (email) and backing up how Slack is the solution. They don’t just say they are the solution, though. They use a super-specific number that shows how big of a difference their product can actually make (48.6% reduction in internal email), thus lending credibility and building trust.

10. Instead of including testimonials or throwing a bunch of numbers at the prospect, Slack gives the prospect a bit more agency. In this case, the prospect has the opportunity to make their own decision about whether or not they want to “See the data.”

This is an interesting choice, considering that other companies often throw all their best ‘social proof’ right onto their landing page.

11. The landing page’s primary CTA. By highlighting the fact that Slack is free for life, what reason would a prospect have to not click the CTA and try it out?

12. This is the ONLY mention of a paid plan on the page. The emphasis on the free plan makes prospects feel like they are NOT being sold to, which in turn gives people a more favorable impression of Slack overall.

13. Gives prospects the option to seek out more info (just as the homepage does).

14. A quick mention of their ‘Contact Us’ page and primary social media accounts.

Top Performing Social Media Traffic

Here’s a breakdown of the traffic Slack gets from social media:

Altogether, Slack gets 800,000+ views monthly from social media.

As you can see, Facebook is a major driver, pulling in half of all this traffic. Though Slack has amassed a lot of followers on Facebook, it seems they use Facebook primarily as a tool to get readers elsewhere.

To start, their cover photo isn’t used to promote Slack itself, but to drive people to their podcast:

And their pinned post at the top of the page directs fans to other methods of contact (in other words, they are trying to pull communications off of Facebook and onto other platforms):

YouTube is the next biggest source of social media traffic, pulling in approximately 155,000 visitors monthly.

Slack’s YouTube channel is a combination of general Slack content, tutorials, and case studies.

But if you sort Slack’s videos by the most popular, you’ll notice that the best performing videos fall into a different category; namely, they are TV ads that Slack actually ran.

Repurposing these successful TV ads as YouTube video content has obviously worked well as Slack’s top video (as seen above and below) has claimed more than 15,000,000 views.

Plus, the clever folks at Slack knew just how to get those who enjoyed the video interested enough to click on Slack’s website: a CTA that goes to Slack’s website but doesn’t make any mention of what Slack actually is.

Since YouTube has such a wide-ranging audience, many of whom might not know what Slack does, this was a great way to generate further interest and entice viewers to click. If they had mentioned in the CTA screen that they were a messaging app, likely many people wouldn’t have bothered to click through because they wouldn’t think this was a company relevant to them.

Also, notice the unique tracking URL Slack is using to measure traffic from this video campaign. The URL is easy to remember and redirects to the Slack homepage (when you see “slack.com/animals” you get curious and want to know what it’s all about).

Slack is using a direct response marketing tactic called the “curiosity-gap” to get TV viewers to stop what they’re doing and visit their website, and to also get more clicks on YouTube.

Finally, although it takes up a smaller portion of the pie, we can’t not talk about Twitter. In fact, Twitter has actually been Slack’s most important social media platform.

In an interview with First Round, here’s what Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield had to say about Twitter:

“We bet heavily on Twitter. Even if someone is incredibly enthusiastic about a product, literal word-of-mouth will only get to a handful of people – but if someone tweets about us, it can be seen by hundreds, even thousands.”

In other words, Twitter played a huge role in Slack’s viral word-of-mouth growth. Slack’s Wall of Love is a perfect example of this.

People can tweet to @SlackLoveTweets to show their love for Slack.
As for Slack’s tweets themselves, they’ve helped Slack out in a few different ways:

1. They helped Slack build brand awareness and define their company’s voice (a voice that’s been so distinctive, they even wrote a Medium article about it).
2. They help Slack keep their users up-to-date on changes and improvements.
3. They give Slack a venue for getting customer feedback and communicating with customers.

Twitter as a venue for customer communication has been HUGE for Slack. They rely heavily on Twitter for dealing with customer support issues and getting customer feedback.

Plus, Twitter has helped Slack scale the amount of support they provide customers without having to massively scale their support team. Today, Slack’s customer support team is made up of just 18 people, with a group of 6 manning Twitter 24/7. Compared to Slack’s massive customer base, this is an abnormally small support team.

But by concentrating the majority of their customer service interactions on Twitter and being able to interact live, Slack is able to cut way back on the amount of time and resources they pour into more traditional forms of support like email or call centers. And it looks like Slack isn’t alone in utilizing Twitter this way: according to Twitter’s marketing blog, many of Twitter’s advertisers find that “over 80% of their inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter.”

What Slack’s use of social media should teach you is this: social media is about a lot more than just driving traffic and getting clicks. It also gives you the chance to connect with your customers and help make your brand memorable.

How Slack Converts 30% Of Their Free Users To Paid Users

Here’s the final piece of the puzzle. Sure, Slack could be using all of the techniques above to get free sign-ups…but what’s to guarantee these people become paying users later on?

Of Slack’s 4+ million active users, 1.25+ million are paid users.

The first thing to look at is the layout of Slack’s freemium model.

As you can see, Slack’s “free” plan still comes with a bunch of good benefits and is perfectly usable on its own.

So, to see how Slack really won over those paid users, I signed up for a free account to see how they’d try to convert me. Here are the three big things that jumped out during my experiment:

1. Slack has an excellent onboarding process.
2. Slack isn’t salesy in the slightest.
3. Slack puts customer success at the core of all they do, motivated by their innovative “Fair Billing” pricing model.

Let’s analyze the first item: Slack’s excellent onboarding process.

Part of what holds other companies back from converting their freemium users is that these customers often don’t completely understand how to use the product or they don’t truly realize all the product’s benefits and applications.

But Slack has an extra challenge in overcoming this. Slack isn’t a product that’s sold to a single person – but one sold to a team. Which means they have a lot of people to convince.

Slack responding to a Medium comment as an “extension” of their customer onboarding

So what they do is simple, yet brilliant: they provide all the training, tutorials, and resources the customer needs to get the rest of his or her team on board. That way, the customer isn’t stuck with the burden of training and Slack can ensure that the information they put out shows Slack in its best light possible.

Here is a quick example. As part of Slack’s onboarding process, all new users who login for the first time are instantly taken through a tutorial.

Slack’s Help Center is also very well laid-out, showing new customers exactly what steps they need to take next.

Plus, they also have a ton of helpful info on their YouTube channel and in their Medium publication.

A famous memo (which has since been republished on Medium) that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield sent to his team on July 31, 2013, gives us an insight into why Slack has prioritized such a strong, easy-to-follow onboarding process:

“Putting yourself in the mind of someone who is coming to Slack for the first time — especially a real someone, who is being made to try this thing by their boss, who is already a bit angry because they didn’t have time for breakfast, and who is anxious about finishing off a project before they take off for the long weekend — putting yourself in their mind means looking at Slack the way you look at some random piece of software in which you have no investment and no special interest.”

Now onto the second item: Slack’s non-salesy sales process.

When I went through the process of a free sign-up, here’s what I discovered: I never, at any point, actually felt like I was being “sold to.”

First of all, if we look at Slack’s homepage again, you won’t even find an option to sign up for the paid plan.

And after clicking that green “Get Started” button, you are automatically taken through the process to become a free user…without encountering a single message about the paid plan the entire time.

Even if you don’t go through and click that “Get Started” button here or on another page, you won’t find any sort of lead gen elsewhere on the website asking for your name, title, phone, company or website. In other words, Slack doesn’t seem to have any sort of process in place to gather full lead data or contact info (they only ever ask for your email address). Yet another way Slack avoids that salesperson persona.

Now, after I signed up, I kept waiting for some sort of email autoresponder campaign aimed at getting me to convert to a paid user. But yet…there was nothing. Not a single email was sent to me with a mention of upgrading to the paid plan.

Is Slack missing out on conversions by not trying to upsell it’s free users? Maybe. But it’s obviously not bothering them enough to change it. So for now, at least, Slack will remain true to their “not a salesperson” voice.

The third item ties the first and second together: Slack puts customer success at the core of all they do.

Though Slack’s first step with any new customer is an easy onboarding process, that alone is not enough…they also need to keep their customers actually using the product by offering genuine, non-salesy help.

And Slack has no better motivation for this than their innovative “Fair Billing Policy.”

In simple terms, here’s how their policy works: if a Slack user stops using the software for 14 days, Slack will give you your money back through prorated credit.

Slack’s Head of Customer Success explained this himself at the very end of this panel at SaaStock London (29:25 to 30:40).

Slack’s user consumption model forces Slack’s growth to correlate with their customers’ growth, otherwise this happens:

The email Slack send you when you get credit back

This “Fair Billing” model keeps Slack’s whole team ultra-accountable to providing awesome onboarding and a comfortable user experience so they can onboard as many active users as possible.

Sales people can’t just sell an account and then move on.

For this reason, Slack MUST make sure their product is fully integrated into their users’ day-to-day work…or they won’t get paid.

Instead of pushing the customer toward the paid plan, they just set usage limits after a high level of user consumption has taken place. Limits like this:

• Chat history that stops after 10,000 messages
• File storage that stops after 5GB
• App integrations that stop after 10 apps

Slack then uses very strategic in-app messaging (that triggers based on usage limits) to convert freemium users into paid customers, like this:

In-app messages like the one pictured above prompt users to upgrade to a paid plan (but are only shown to the user once Slack has been fully integrated into their day-to-day work). This prompts the customer when they are likely to be most receptive to Slack’s sales message.

Most enterprise software pricing is designed to charge you per user upfront regardless of how many people on your team are actively using the software (for example, if you buy 1,000 seats but only use 100, you still get charged for 1,000).

But as you can see, Slack’s untraditional pricing model is wholly at odds with what most enterprise companies do.

Yet, it’s working. The proof is in the data: Slack has converted 1.25M+ of their 4M+ users into paid users.

9 Key Takeaways from Slack’s Billion-Dollar Success

Slack has some pretty atypical brand marketing techniques that have turned the company into an impressive SaaS powerhouse.

Here are 9 key takeaways:

1. Slack built a business app with unprecedented product-market fit. This combined with Butterfield’s connections from Flickr and their freemium business model caused their app to generate viral word-of-mouth brand awareness.
2. Slack developed a unique, personable, non-salesy brand personality that is consistent across all channels – from their blog, to their social media, to their ads.
3. Slack focused their SEO strategy around branded keywords and integration partner keywords as opposed to content marketing.
4. Slack piggybacked off the success and tapped into the audience of other successful companies through integrations.
5. Slack used Medium as an outlet for gathering new viewers, keeping customers and followers in-the-know about product updates, and building their brand name.
6. Slack built their paid marketing strategy around a small handful of highly-relevant brand keywords and experimented with some more traditional advertising techniques like TV and newspaper ads.
7. Slack created fairly minimalist landing pages that easily led prospects to their “Get Started” CTA for a free signup.
8. Slack used social media as a way to not only drive traffic, but further their brand voice and get valuable customer interaction.
9. Slack nailed their free to paid user conversion rate with an excellent onboarding process, a non-pushy sales method, and a unique “Fair Billing” pricing model based on usage not seats.

Slack gets 100M+ website visitors every month. That’s more than Salesforce, HubSpot, Intercom, Zendesk, Mailchimp, Shopify and every other software company in the world.

They are also the fastest company in the world to get to a $1 billion valuation (1.25 years).

But it’s not all about that.

Slack is a role model for what it takes to build a software company loved by both small businesses and fortune 100 companies alike. If you love what Slack has done and you loved this in-depth analysis, then spread the love by retweeting below:

Take notes… these #marketing strategies from @SlackHQ are $$$. ❤️ you @SlackLoveTweets @OpenViewLabs @vonwilpert https://t.co/n1mMGiqJBR

— Chris Von Wilpert (@vonwilpert) July 12, 2017

If you would like to read more in-depth growth studies like this, you should go here.

The post Peek Inside Slack’s Multi-Million Dollar SaaS Growth Strategy appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The pressure for HR Leaders to provide organizations with top performing sales candidates in short periods of time is on the rise. B2B sales reps typically onboard over 10 months with 24 months of average tenure. It is therefore of the utmost importance to hire top salespeople quickly and retain them long-term.

Being responsible for the overall recruitment process of new salespeople, human resource leaders are very familiar with the negative impacts caused by the lengthy time required when hiring new sales and sales leaders. These negative impacts can include: loss of revenue & market share, decreases in sales productivity, and lowered employee morale.

In this article, we will discuss the changes human resource leaders can make in their recruitment process. These changes will counter the negative impacts of vacant sales roles and shorten time needed to hire new salespeople.

We will provide tools that can be implemented into an existing recruitment process, which will:

• Increase the pool of qualified candidates;
• Reduce time to fill;  
• Improve hiring manager and candidate satisfaction rates;
• Strengthen quality of hire rates   

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Skip to section:
Cost of a vacant role
Improvement drivers
Identify your hiring stakeholders
Build a robust hiring plan
Eliminate boring job descriptions
Automate your screening process
Consolidate your interview process
Leverage the notice period
Download your hiring criteria worksheet

Here is your ultimate guide to reducing your time to hire: 

The Cost of a Vacant Role

Does your sales leader truly understand the cost of open headcount?

Having an open vacancy in your sales department for even one-day has a negative impact on your organization. With an average time to fill of 68 days and an average time to hire of 57.5 days — which has increased by 50 percent over the past five years — pipeline strength and sales revenue can quickly erode.

For example, if you’re looking to fill a vacant Account Executive role with an annual quota of five million dollars, you will be losing 787,600 thousand dollars over the 57.5 time to hire average.

To calculate your precise revenue loss potential, use the formula below:

 

 

 

 

Brandon Naber from Flare HR states,

 

“We have a 10 sales rep headcount on this team. We have 9 reps hired and currently selling, 1 headcount vacant. Because of this vacancy, every rep needs to hit over 110 percent of their quota for us to hit our team revenue target. Multiply that by our 4 sales teams – that’s a multi-million revenue problem for our company. Yikes.”

Understanding the negative impacts of open headcount goes beyond top-line revenue and includes sales force morale is critical. Potential decreases in rep productivity and absenteeism due to burnout are directly correlated to sales force understaffing. 

Reps are often told to hunt and/or manage open territories and accounts all while tasked with delivering on their own goals and metrics.

With the average cost per turnover at 150 percent of the employee’s salary, sales and HR leaders walk a costly fine line when overloading reps that can’t sustain the necessary activity and behavior levels needed for success. 

When reps aren’t set up for success, role disengagement skyrockets.   

In fact, research shows that only 30 percent of US employees are actively engaged and passionate about their workplace. The remaining 70 percent are either disengaged or actively disengaged. Gallup estimates corporations lose between 450-550 billion dollars in revenue every year as a direct result of employee disengagement.

Improvement Drivers for Your Sales Recruitment Process

Understand Where Your Challenges Are in the Hiring Funnel

For HR Leaders, the challenge lies in improving team metrics like time to fill, time to hire, and time to start. The difference between these three metrics being:

Time to fill
The number of days between a job’s publication date and an accepted offer.

Time to hire
The time elapsed between engaging a candidate and them accepting an offer.

Time to start
The lag time between when a candidate accepts an offer and when they start.

To decrease your time-time-hire your team needs to have a thorough understanding of the differences between these three metrics. Understanding these nuances allows you to hone in on the areas that will have the greatest time decreases.

For example, you may find that in order to improve your time to hire, you need to decrease your interview time. If you find it takes too long for the candidate application process, then you can improve your time to fill.

Below we created a breakdown of a resume’s timeline as it goes through the stages of a recruitment process.

Top salespeople only spend an average of ten days on the market before being recruited for their next role. With organizations averaging a time to hire of 57.5 days, talent shortages are fueling hiring managers to make bad hiring decisions.

So how do you find a quality candidate while decreasing how long it takes to fill your vacant role?

Identify Your Hiring Stakeholders

HR needs to take a leadership position by identifying the stakeholders in the recruiting process. This will not only improve sales hiring speed but also quality. Depending on the size of your organization, these stakeholders can vary.

Small to midsize businesses
You could have your CEO and/or Company Owner, and Sales Leader. Again, this may vary depending on the sales team you have developed to date.

Large enterprise organizations
Depending on role seniority, you could have your HR Leader, your Sales Leader and their company peers, and your CEO. If it’s a simple Account Executive role, the recruitment process wouldn’t involve your CEO. For senior roles like VP of Sales, the CEO would typically be involved.

In your stakeholder list, include the following information:

• The stakeholders (names and titles)
• The order of their involvement in the process
• The tasks they will be responsible for
• The timelines associated with said tasks

This list is sent to all involved stakeholders to ensure they’re informed and understand what the recruitment expectations are. It is crucial they understand how important it is for the process to be time sensitive. Time can make or break the hiring of an ideal candidate.

For example:

If it is your Hiring Manager who conducts the candidate review process and selects who will come in for an interview, then list on the Stakeholder List Worksheet that they have two business days to review the resumes and decide who they want to speak with directly.

Having this timeline expectation on the worksheet, allows you to hold them accountable and address the issue if deadlines are not met.

By using this process, you can decrease your resume review process from the 25-days to two business days.

Build a Robust Sales Hiring Plan

What is your sales hiring plan?

Most organization’s will have an established hiring plan for all roles within your organization. The best sales hiring plan’s are tied to both the corporate strategy and sales strategies, and include:

• Headcount budget (quarterly & yearly)
• Hiring stakeholders (by role)
• Advertising channels
• Hiring timelines  

Make sure you are tracking the sources of your hires and the sources of your most successful hires. You can then determine where most of your past sales hiring successes have come from.

Prior to leveraging different sourcing channels it is imperative to create a way to objectively measure sales candidates. An effective way to do this is to create a set of mandatory hiring criteria.

These criteria lay the foundation for subsequent processes including job postings, selection, setting realistic expectations, and compensation. By establishing hiring criteria, you increase the speed and accuracy of your recruitment decisions, and in turn decrease your time to hire.

When creating your hiring criteria, establish which ones are mandatory and which are additional bonuses. These mandatory criteria consist of skills and experience you would not be willing to provide training for upon hire.

The non-mandatory criteria is a list of skills and experience that would be considered an added benefit but would not negatively impact the candidate’s potential success.

 

 

Eliot Burdett, CEO of Peak Sales Recruiting, states

 

“Rank your “must-have” and “desirable” attributes. Be mindful when creating the list, as too many filters will result in a restricted pool of candidates. Too few requirements will increase the pool but can leave you with a load of bad matches. Refer to this list when reviewing resumes and during interviews. This will make the selection process easier. A candidate with all “desirable” factors will not make the cut compared to the applicant with a list of “must-have” attributes.”

According to Forbes, to hire a quality salesperson for your organization you must establish your company’s vision and goals. Then find candidates who meet and solve the challenges specific to your organization. By establishing these challenges early on, you will avoid time wasted on unfit sales candidates.

To help you create your own hiring criteria we have included a worksheet for you to follow. Download it here.

Upon completing your mandatory hiring criteria you can refocus your energies to pursuing candidates through your most successful channels.

Since 62 percent  of all passive candidates, who are presently employed and successful in their roles, obtain new roles through networking, it is critical to leverage your current top performers’ networks to find additional top performers more efficiently.

Lou Adler

Research demonstrates that by leveraging Employee Referral Programs (ERP), you can drastically decrease your time to start. Referral candidates typically begin their roles 58 percent quicker than those found on job boards and career sites.

With the average employee having more than 150 contacts on their social media networks, you can easily add this channel into your hiring strategy and begin tapping into your employee’s networks before pursuing other acquisition tactics like posting job ads.

The employee retention rate of referral based candidates is significantly higher than those hired through other channels. With 46 percent staying over one-year, 45 percent staying over two-years, and 47 percent staying over three years.

Choosing a reward for employees who participate in your ERP depends on what you think their top motivator is. With companies finding 40-60 percent of their hires through ERPs, monetary rewards tend to gain the most employee attention.

Google, for example, pays two thousand dollars for an employee referral, and has doubled this reward for further encouragement. However, what motivates Google employees to provide referrals is due to the fact that they enjoy where they work. This enjoyment has driven them to recommend other people to join their positive environment.

Build Your Virtual Bench

What do you do if someone leaves the company unexpectedly?

There will always be unexpected departures within the sales industry. With the application process typically taking 10.5 days, it is the organizations who are prepared that successfully recruit their new salespeople faster.

With 65-75 percent of candidates today being passive, it can take many months to build relationships and persuade top performers to join your organization. During this time, you have to educate them on your future strategies while also learning about their careers goals.

This process takes great effort, especially while under the pressures of providing top salespeople to your internal stakeholders fast. Having a plan in place is one that would eliminate this pressure while also meeting the recruitment timeline expectations of your stakeholders.

One preparatory measure you should have in place is a virtual bench. The concept of the virtual bench is often discussed when referring to sports. Scouts are always hunting for quality players yet the interactions between players and scouts happen long before a move.

This concept is no different when it comes to sales. Top quality players take the time to decide where they would like to take their career. They want to know that their next move is in line with their long-term goals. Having a virtual bench of A-Player salespeople you are constantly nurturing, gives you an edge with both time and your ability to beat your competition.

Your virtual bench should consist of 10 prospective candidates who you are reaching out to regularly to build relationships. These candidates should then become people you can contact to potentially join your company at any time.

Your bench should also contain ten influencers who may not want to join your company but can recommend a top performing salesperson to you at the drop of a hat.

By maintaining and effectively utilizing your virtual bench, you are eliminating the 10.5 days it takes for the candidate application process. As a result , you decrease your overall time to fill by 15 percent.

Eliminate Boring Job Descriptions & Replace with Career Opportunities

What are the makings of a job description that will attract and engage the right candidates?

Job descriptions that focus on the benefits of working for your organization will outperform those that focus on role requirements and tasks.

While you want to ensure that the prospective candidates meet all the requirements and can complete the necessary selling tasks, the goal of your job description is to captivate the prospective candidate by illustrating the career opportunity they can’t afford to miss.

Some simple ways to improve your job descriptions include:

• Devise an EVP (employee value proposition) explaining how this new role would be a step up, versus a lateral move, to someone who is already doing similar work.
• Instead of creating a list of mandatory skills and experience, which may cause top performers to opt out of the application process, make it a list of performance objectives for their first three months, six months, 12 months, and beyond. This will allow the prospect to visualize themselves completing these tasks and begin thinking about their strategies.
• Include a section focusing on the benefits of working for your organization. How are you different from other organizations of a similar size and industry? You can do this by conducting a simple survey with your current employees to discover their favorite reasons behind working at your organization. Some anonymous survey tools you could use include:

 

• Describe potential opportunities for advancement. This information will entice candidates to apply and pursue the role since they know they can progress and be part of an organization long-term.

Your job description is the first phase in your employee experience and is of the utmost importance. Your first impression with these top performing candidates is just as important as their first impression with you.

Many companies are taking their job descriptions beyond the traditional word document or PDF and are leveraging emerging technology.

Skill Scout is an example of an organization that produces short job videos that serve as “job posts in motion” so candidates can preview what the job is like and the skills they will require for success. Instead of reading a traditional document, they get a real life view into the organization.

SAP have begun using cartoons and video games to portray what life at their company is like. In fact, statistics show that job postings on Facebook that feature video get 36 percent more applications.

To help you create an enticing job description, we have created several templates for you to follow:

• VP of Sales Job Description Template
• Sales Manager Job Description Template
• Account Executive Job Description Template
• Sales Engineer Job Description Template

Automate Your Initial Screening Process

The initial screening process typically takes 15.6 days but there are tools you can harness to decrease this time. These tools also mitigate hiring biases, which can cause you to overlook top performers and make costly mis-hires.

Automating your screening process involves using your choice of online software, which you would attach to your job ad. Some of this software could include psychometric assessments, cognitive testing, simulation tests, and even video interviewing.

These tests are objective, data-driven ways of evaluating your prospective candidate’s potential success in the role without lengthy human-to-human interaction.

Some of the most innovative ideas on the market today include cognitive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). For example, Olivia, is an AI software that moves candidates through an application process with sequenced questions. It automatically eliminates unqualified candidates and reduces the candidate screening time.

One company in particular, Ericsson, has taken their recruiting process one step further and has implemented a stage called “Candidate Care.” After applying and being screened for a role, unsuccessful candidates will receive an invitation letter to take advantage of the job placement portal.

The portal provides candidates the opportunity to improve their resume, boost their interview skills, and improve their job search skills. With 98 percent of candidates registering for the portal, it can be used as a pool of candidates to contact for future roles.

After implementing the automation process, human resources reviews the candidates the automation software has deemed as the top performers. They’re submitted to the next stakeholder with the 48 hour timeline expectation, which you established in the stakeholder worksheet.

Since computers are screening candidates based on objective measures, hiring managers avoid potential biases that come with person-to-person screenings. According to Business Insider, the risks of hiring based on gut feeling is high, with a 50 percent failure rate. 

Therefore, if you hire 20 new salespeople in one year, ten of them will fail and be considered bad sales hires.

Here are the top three reasons why you should never hire on “gut” feeling:

1. The costs, both direct and indirect, of a poor sales hire, are astronomical.
2. The “gut” is an emotional response. The person in front of you may bring to mind someone you used to know, and this may spell a positive or negative ‘gut’ reaction that has nothing to do with the candidate’s qualifications. Even in an all day interview, it is impossible to thoroughly get to know a person. It is natural to use our own internal picture, our gut, of who this person is to fill in the blanks.
3. Salespeople are very skilled at making good first impressions.

Our gut reaction is not an avoidable factor. It is always there but it must be tempered with our brain. The next time you feel yourself falling prey to basing a decision on gut, ask yourself if you have the proof required to hire this individual.

For more information on how to find top performing sales people, download Sales Recruiting 2.0.

Additional Benefits To Automating Your Screening Process:

Flexibility and Efficiency
Candidates can go through the screening process at any time. Scheduling and planning is not necessary, and it is available to them 24 hours a day. You are typically capable of turning the screening system on and off, while controlling how many applicants you accept.

Customization
You can incorporate your mandatory hiring criteria, which you established via the worksheet above, for additional customization.

Candidate Tracking
You can analyze the candidate data at your leisure and track the candidate information to keep for future roles.

Upon completion, the candidate’s information and answers would be recorded and sent to you accordingly. There are many pieces of software on the market to choose from, such as Sonru. They have created an automated video interview screening software that cuts your screening time down by 80 percent. As a result, you decrease your HR screening average from 15.6 days to two days.

Consolidate Your Interview Process

The interview process commonly takes 15.6 days, which accounts for 23 percent of the overall recruiting process. But employers that consolidate this process can reduce their interview time by 156 percent.

An effective way to consolidate your interview process is to schedule all in-person interviews on the same day. Simply provide your candidates with the date their interview will take place and one or two time options. This allows them to choose a time that works best or rearrange their schedule to fit the best time.

Some technologies you could use for interview scheduling  include:

The odd candidate may be unable to come in on the day you have specified. Depending on if the candidate is active or passive, you may choose to find a day that fits both your schedules. If you’ve analyzed their screening results and determine they are a top performer, then bringing them in on a different day is to your benefit.

By conducting all your interviews on the same day, you can conduct a thorough apples-to-apples comparison while the information is fresh in your mind. You also decrease your interview process from the average 15.6 days to one day.

Leverage The Notice Period

When you’ve selected your successful candidate and provided them with an offer, you then begin the notice period. This time period commonly happens over the course of two weeks but can be longer. The time frame depends on how senior the person is in their organization.

There are many factors that impact a salesperson’s notice period, such as:

• Not wanting to burn bridges
• Needing to find and train someone to replace them
• Being on the verge of closing a large deal
• Wanting to wait to get paid their commission.

It is important to be conscious of these possibilities and maximize the time you have before they officially come onboard.

Beginning someone’s training while they are in their notice period is a way for you to decrease the amount of onboarding time required. You can provide reading material on your company, your clients, and your industry, so they are well versed upon arrival. If you have online training courses, request they do these courses in advance of their first day*.

Lastly, you can request some additional time outside of regular work hours to have one-on-one meetings to begin the onboarding process. You can use this time to sign paperwork, introduce them to clients, attend team building activities or anything else you deem as part of your onboarding process*.

*Note – these activities may count as active employment. Please abide by your local laws and employment standards.

Doing The Math  

After taking the time to review your process and gather a thorough understanding of where you can benefit from time decreases, you have the potential to decrease your time to hire by an astounding 91 percent simply by implementing some effective tools and making minor changes.

How did we arrive at this number?

Based on the graph provided in the “Understand Where Your Challenges Are” section of this article we have established the resume timeline during an average time to hire, which is 57.5 days. Looking back on all the tools and strategies we suggested for implementation, we have been able to decrease each stage and as a result, decrease the average time to hire to 6.3 days.

 

 

 

 

 

(You can also calculate your new time to fill average by adding in the “application stage”, which takes an average of 10.5 days. By leveraging your network and nurturing your virtual bench, you can eliminate the time needed to post job ads and wait for applications altogether.)

By implementing these tactics and tools, you will deliver your internal stakeholders better sales candidates, faster.

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The post Reduce Your Time To Hire By 91% When Sales Recruiting appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Use Email Marketing to Build Your Online Influence

Have your email marketing campaigns been ineffective lately?

Would you like to see more growth on your blog and social networks?

As your business attracts new subscribers the golden opportunity to build relationships and present valuable offers can be used to increase your traffic and grow your social media fans and followers despite the latest algorithm changes.

Email marketing will not only help you maintain your current subscribers, but can also be used to nurture your prospects and invite them to participate in giveaways, join a professional group on LinkedIn or Facebook, provide valuable and exclusive offers, and much more.

According to a study by McKinsey & Company, email marketing plays an important role in attracting more brand followers:

This is especially true of emails that include the first name and then thank their subscribers with a personalized message as shown in a recent article on Hubspot.

In order to reach the most visitors you need to appeal to their emotions as well as make it easy to open our messages on any device. Here are several ways you can attract new subscribers and encourage them to follow you on social media.

Write an attractive headline

The first point of contact between your business and the reader is the headline. Take your time to write the best hook for your audience, which should grab their attention right away and appeal to their needs or desires. Constant Contact recommends that you should always include your brand or individual name, as this is something your subscribers will recognize.

They also recommend a shorter, more personalized approach that compels people to take action and includes honesty, which is based on a study by Adestra:

Place the focus on your readers

During the early phases of your email campaigns it’s important to appeal to your readers first. What tips or webinars could be of value to them? Can your business offer a free training session that doesn’t include a high pressure sales message? Later on as you establish a relationship you can move on to include important updates, product or service announcements, or information about your company without being too pushy. The bulk of your messages need to be about the reader and how your brand or business can best meet their needs. Here’s a great example of offering a free report for those interested in becoming a speaker:

Measure the response rate

Most email services include statistics on how well your messages are being received — some even include suggestions on how to cut down on being flagged as spam. As you take a look back at your history you will soon discover which campaigns get the most clicks and views. Take note of the topics that garner the most attention, and which emails have a low open rate.

Promote separate campaigns

Let your audience know right away what your business is offering them by creating separate campaigns. It’s tempting to write emails that contain too much information and are not focused on a targeted message. Give your readers something to look forward to in a series of emails with a call-to-action to share on social media.

Fewer graphics and more text

As you are designing a template take into account that your emails will most likely be read on a smaller screen. Instead of too many graphics use rich text and bold keywords to help your reader follow along and digest the message in bite-sized chunks. Keep the message short, and to the point in order to improve your chances of them taking action like this example:

Segment your messages

This is especially important if you are selling as a B2B — segmenting your subscribers for your target market will help you focus on those who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Create separate lists of subscribers for each of your campaigns such as book launch or product announcement.

Include links and icons to your social networks

Organic growth on social media has been diminishing over the last couple of years, and so brands have needed to be more creative in attracting a larger audience to their networks. Like it or not advertising is here to stay, and this will become a growing trend. But you can still improve your numbers by including icons and links to your profiles as well as sharing buttons inside your email message.

With the right focus and strategy your next email marketing campaign can help grow your online presence and improve your conversion rates. Make sure your content is simple, to the point, and easy to read. As you measure your results you will be able to better determine what your audience is looking for and how to best meet their needs both on your website and through social media.

Even for experienced deal makers, a first digital acquisition is bound to be an education. Companies acquire to accelerate their overall strategy and digital transformation, as Publicis Groupe did when it acquired Sapient for $3.7 billion in 2014 to help it make the leap from a traditional advertising company to a digital one. But when companies turn to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to help them deal with digital disruption, they usually discover not only how different a beast digital M&A is compared with traditional M&A, but also that everything they thought they knew about M&A may actually not help. They’re also likely to be paying an even higher premium for the acquisition, betting on a fast—although uncertain—development.

Few executives appear prepared for the challenges of digital M&A. When we recently interviewed top M&A executives in Europe about their experience, fully three-quarters of them said that digital disruption has had a relatively large impact or even requires a complete overhaul of their M&A strategy. However, only 11% described themselves as being either “mature” or “advanced” on the learning curve.

So, what do you need to know to get up the learning curve? Doing digital M&A right means upending the way most companies approach financing, due diligence, and merger integration.

Let’s start with financing the deal. Determining the right valuation begins by understanding how the acquisition will affect your company’s equity profile. The ultimate goal is to signal to the market that the digital acquisition is part of a series of moves that will help you adapt and win in the digitalization of your industry.

Insight Center

Meanwhile, because digital targets tend to be expensive, acquirers are limited in their ability to use stock to finance a deal. The dilutive effect for existing shareholders would be too high. On the other hand, acquiring a risky digital target in a 100% cash deal may expose the company to overvalued goodwill and future write-offs. To mitigate the risk linked to the target’s high multiples, you need to evaluate all potential financing solutions, considering adapted payment terms such as earn-outs or other deferred payment mechanisms. When your company ultimately becomes a more legitimate digital player, you can be more flexible in how you finance future deals.

In March 2016, Thales purchased Vormetric, the growing cybersecurity firm, for $400 million, which was 5.7 times Vormetric’s sales. The acquisition communicated to the market that Thales was shifting its financial profile to the high-growth business. Over time, Thales’ strategy, including multiple acquisitions in the cybersecurity space, will increasingly be captured in its price-to-earnings (PE) ratio and overall valuation, helping to attract growth investors. In fact, by the end of December 2016, Thales traded at a 21.8 PE multiple, a 15% premium over the aerospace and defense industry, which averaged 18.9.

Next, you need to understand how digital M&A turns traditional due diligence on its head. To get a good valuation, companies screen a target before value has actually been monetized, and must compensate for a lack of financials. Unlike the way traditional due diligence usually works, acquirers need to be much more forward-looking, using approaches that evaluate the potential success of the business model under different scenarios. The best acquirers build and manage a community of external experts, relying on them heavily to support diligence in areas that are hard to assess objectively.

Diligence starts by asking a fundamental question: Is the acquirer capable of becoming a strong corporate parent? Many executives think first about how an acquisition will help them transform their own business, instead of how they can accelerate the profitable development of the digital asset they are acquiring, through financial resources, access to market, capabilities or technologies.

Thankfully, there are digital tools to complement the traditional sources of information. For example, some companies use tools that can assess the perception and market recognition of the target. For sector and company screening, the data provider CB Insights helps develop information-rich company profiles, visualize competitive dynamics and uncover nonfinancial performance metrics.

For diligence into a particular company, web scraping provides indicators of market share and growth momentum, such as web-traffic analysis and geographic coverage vs. competitors over time by extracting location websites. Sysomos offers social media site analysis that could help an acquirer understand what people are saying about a target. Web scraping by Quad Analytix pulls assortment mix and price point data from multiple retail sites to help acquirers understand market dynamics. Acquirers may also turn to Glassdoor or LinkedIn to assess the culture, or rely on tools that provide insights into the operating model of the acquired company— moves that help them mitigate potential integration issues.

Indeed, integration of digital assets is a huge, thorny problem fraught with cultural issues. How do you absorb the new entity you acquired without killing it?

If the deal is intended to expand your company’s scope with new customers, products, markets or channels, you are likely to require only selective integration. That means investigating where each company can benefit from the other in technologies, customer proximity, go-to-market access and other capabilities. After Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion in 2016, Micro¬soft’s CEO confirmed that LinkedIn would be kept autonomous, but that Microsoft engineers would be tasked with seeing how they could innovate with this new asset.

However, if your company faces a major business model disruption linked to digital and you have already done several acquisitions in the specific area, it may make sense to fully integrate the acquired company. You may also consider a reverse takeover approach, in which you give the leadership of the acquired digital asset a broader business or functional responsibility within the combined company — anticipating challenges of helping it adapt within a larger organization. After its acquisition of Sapient, Publicis effectively gave that company’s executives greater responsibility in developing the digital part of its business. A few years later, it also created Sapient Inside, a network of Sapient digital specialists who help its traditional advertising agencies benefit from best-practice methods and tools. Publicis now gets 50% of its revenue from digital—that’s ahead of its 2018 target.

In either case, acquirers need to carefully manage the transition in which leaders of the digital asset relinquish the entrepreneurial part of their jobs and become managers exclusively. Digital asset leaders are not always adept at navigating within the matrix organization of a large company, requiring specific coaching and support from the acquirer’s leaders. Acquirer’s must accommodate the inevitable differences in decision-making speed, and that may mean adjusting the acquirer’s own governance or putting a specific governance in place to deal with the acquired asset or the business area affected by the acquired asset. More broadly, acquirers may face the need to diffuse a digital acquisition’s risk-taking culture and mindset within their larger corporation.

Digital disruption will only intensify. As it does, companies in all industries will turn to M&A. But they’ll need to evolve their deal-making skills for digital. The best companies will implement a feedback loop, learning from their inevitable rookie mistakes to improve and build consistent, repeatable capabilities for the future.

Recently, a niche retailer we’ve been working with for years began to fret about monthly promotions and asked, “Do people just wait for the next sale?” The concern was that intermittent discounts were disrupting consumer behavior.

We love questions like this. There’s always something to learn from a client question, especially if that question is rooted in concern.

Here’s what we did. (And you can do it, too!)

 

Conduct shopper behavior research with a survey.

Ask the right consumers. In this case, we wanted to know more about people who shop during promotions. We used HubSpot to create a smart list of shoppers who had used a coupon code during a promo.

Use free tools. A simple Google Form did the trick for our research. Don’t use more muscle than you need. Most of the time, a free tool will do the trick.

Incentivize feedback. Engagement with customer surveys is typically very low. We offered an incentive of $10 to every respondent. The incentive resulted in a 50% conversion rate.

Be clear about the time commitment. At the top of the survey, we made it clear that it wouldn’t take long, and that the research was being used to help the niche retailer better serve shoppers.

Allow for feedback. Though we had very specific questions we needed answered, the survey allowed for additional comments. This gave shoppers a chance to speak directly to the retailer — and they did!

Sharpen buyer personas.

Buyer personas aren’t static. If you created them a year ago or more, you should revisit them.

We used this survey as an opportunity to glean more information about shoppers — discovering where they go for information in the niche industry, whether they use products personally or professionally, and how often they browse.

As a result of the survey, we have a better understanding of the types of content loyal shoppers find useful, and where (and why) they shop when they’re not shopping with our client. This insight will inform future tactics, especially around the types of content we create as part of robust inbound marketing strategies.

Come at key questions from different angles.

You’ve done a personality test online, right? The most annoying part is having to answer the same question over and over. While we didn’t go full-on irritating, we did ask one particular question in two different ways.

• Will you wait for the next sale to make another purchase?
• Have you made another purchase since the sale?

While half the shoppers surveyed claimed they’d wait for the next sale before making a purchase, 71 percent of shoppers had already made another purchase on full-price items since the last sale. Behavior doesn’t lie.

Our client was happy to learn that every user surveyed indicated that they planned on shopping again in the future.

While this seems like a vanity statistic, it has value to us as marketers. We know that our client is being perceived as remarkable — a key element of successful marketing.

Dig into communication preferences.

Our client has been building a highly engaged email list for nearly a decade. They were very concerned that sending too many marketing emails might upset their list and discourage recipients from shopping.

Act on the results.

Research is useless if you don’t use it to grow. Digging deeper into consumer preferences gave us two major takeaways for our client.

Email is powerful.The results of the survey allowed us to not only demonstrate that their shoppers prefer email, but it gave us the insight needed to pivot toward even more email communications. Now, in addition to a weekly newsletter and sale email, we send a blast about a limited edition product and a spotlight on an additional product each month. Open rates hold steady around 35%.

Switch things up.While we quickly discovered that sales don’t disrupt consumer behavior for this particular retailer, we also learned that shoppers preferred a wide variety of sales and discounts. We remain unpredictable with sales, offering a mix of BOGO sales, free gifts, free shipping, and percentage discounts.

Replicate this research on a scale that works for you and your audience to get the same kind of valuable insight. Then adjust your tactics accordingly.

Want to run successful Facebook campaigns that bring in the sales? Of course you do! The key to running the perfect ad is optimization, optimization, optimization!

Optimization doesn’t have to be a full time job – in this week’s post we look at those quick Facebook optimization hacks that will help lower your CPCs and increase your CTRs while sticking to your ad budget. Time is money so let’s jump in!

1. Automate Your Optimization

Facebook Ads’ automation rules are the perfect way to stay on top of your Facebook advertising optimization. These rules allow you to adjust bids and budgets, send yourself notifications and pause campaigns and ads, all based on certain rule conditions that you set yourself. As any eCommerce entrepreneur will tell you, any admin automation hack that saves you time and money is a big gift.

Here’s how you can set up your Facebook ad conditions:

Select one (or more) of your ad sets, campaigns or ads and click the edit button and ‘create rule’.

Here you can do things like turn off campaigns when spend gets to a certain amount or if your frequency is too high, or set up automatic overviews to be sent to your inbox when automation changes.

2. Take Advantage of FTO

Campaigns can take their sweet time to take off, which means you need to wait for those results to start coming in to get the results you need to optimize. Not to be confused with Facebook’s Accelerated Delivery option, the FTO (fast take off) method is a way the experts use to expedite the process. Here’s how: Launch a new campaign using a higher budget (lifetime or daily) than your planned amount and wait for your impressions to reach 10k. You will then have enough data to tweak, and then adjust your bids to match your planned budgets. Unlike Accelerated Delivery, this will ensure you are not just pushing your ads out faster, but getting quality results.

Pro Tip:

Facebook campaigns need between 24-48 hours to adjust to major changes. So wait a minimum of 24 hours before adjusting any campaign.

3. Double Results with Split Testing

Split testing is an ideal way to ensure the campaign you run with is highly successful from the start. The general rule is that you will want to start with a variety of image, description and caption variations for the same target audience. Using smaller budgets, you can launch all your ads and assess which ad you should pause based on its performance. Creating ads using split testing will ensure much better results from the get-go that need minimal tweaking, or that you’re not wasting time and money on the wrong ad set.

4. Exclude those Converters

As I discussed in our Facebook remarketing tips post, excluding converters is an important step to stretching your ad budget further. However, it is not only important for remarketing, but for all Facebook advertising campaigns. Moving leads who have clicked through your ad to your store, and even better, bought, will ensure that you can segment your marketing correctly. Warm leads being funneled into your remarketing funnels, and carrying on with lead generation ads that show to new customers.

You can do this when creating your audience by excluding those people who have visited your site or a specific page, like a ‘thank you for your purchase’ page, or by excluding people who responded to your special offer already. That way, as they visit your site or respond to your lead, they will not keep seeing your ads.

[Image Source]

5. Segment Data

When optimizing, you will want to do more of what is working and less of what isn’t. To do that you need to be organized with your data.

You can get breakdowns on the gender, age, placement, region, etc. of the people connecting to your ads. Dig deep into these reports to get a true understanding of your ad’s performance, an understanding that your overall summary will not give you. This will allow you to make tweaks according to this data and therefore maximize your results.

7. Rotate Against Ad Fatigue

You can have the best ad, optimized to perfection, but if the same people are seeing it over and over before they’re ready to put their money where their mouse is, the repetition could slow your results. Ad fatigue has negative effects on CTRs and costs, but you can fight ad fatigue by simply rotating your high-performing, optimized ads. An easy way to manage this is to set up an ad campaign with multiple ad sets – each with different CTA and image – and then schedule those ads to be active at different times, just like Shopify has done below. Same messaging and market, different visuals and text.

8. Don’t Forget Scheduling Optimization

It may seem like a small tweak, but it so often overlooked and can make a considerable difference to how much reach you get for your spend. Scheduling your ads means you can select when in the day your ads are shown and on what days, to ensure your target audience see your ads. Use the breakdown reporting to see which times of the day bring you the most conversions for the least amount of cost, and then optimize your ad to only run during those times.

Main Takeaway: Don’t Be in a Rush to Turn Off Entire Ad Sets

Ultimately, if your ad just isn’t giving you the results you want for your spend, it is easy to want to just throw in the towel. But turning off your ad set without investigation could mean you are missing out on juicy traffic because of a few missed tweaks. By building a strong campaign foundation and testing different creatives to find the right artwork for the right audience for the right budget, and then tweaking based on the above optimization hacks, you shouldn’t need to kill any ad sets. Instead, LOOK AT ALL THE DATA and pause specific ads that are stale, leaving high-performing sets in place.

Email is cited as the most effective digital marketing channel for customer retention in the U.S., while also serving as the foundation of the marketing-to-sales funnel for the majority of B-to-B and B-to-C marketers.

However, the inevitable attrition occurs for the majority of brands. Though consumers may not formally opt out, a significant number of formerly active buyers simply stop engaging with a brand’s email communications and are removed from the CRM program altogether.

Ultimately, these inactive records become an impediment to strong engagement metrics, adversely impacting deliverability and prompting companies to cease marketing to these customers, thereby eliminating all future revenue potential.

Given that numerous studies demonstrate that opt-in consumers are more profitable than those who cannot be communicated with via email, marketers can’t afford to ignore unengaged buyers. These inactive buyers no longer need to sit dormant — there’s an option to reactivate these opt-in consumers and drive additional revenue.

Email for Reactivation

According to a Marketing Sherpa study, upwards of 75 percent of email subscribers are inactive. When using email for reactivation, a multifaceted approach should be implemented to address the challenge of inactive email records, using the following key elements:

Data Hygiene and Enhancement:

Approximately 25 percent to 30 percent of contact data goes bad each year under normal circumstances. People move, businesses change, people get new jobs, email conventions change and the list goes on. If you have inactive customer records sitting in your database, you’ll need to verify the deliverability of your emails. A data enhancement service can verify which emails are bad, append new emails to files, identify addresses known to be associated with spam traps, and even add additional demographic elements to your records to improve segmentation techniques.

Types of Email Messaging for Reactivation:

The next step is to segment your email subscribers based on criteria such as clickers who haven’t purchased within a certain time frame, nonopeners, or openers who haven’t clicked or purchased within a certain time frame.

There are many strategies that can be implemented to get your customers buying again. Be sure to experiment to see which types of email (and at what frequency) get the most traction for each customer segment.

That’s only the first step, however. Once a customer decides to open your email, the content needs to be enticing. Research suggests that using a shorter subject line is more effective in win-back emails. Consider using words such as “miss you” and “come back” to achieve higher read rates. Emails with specific dollar amount discounts in subject lines vs. percent-off discounts have also been shown to perform well when reactivating lapsed customers.

Relevancy:

People unsubscribe from emails due to content that’s no longer relevant to them. Often, the best and most effective way to get to know your subscribers better is simply to ask for their demographic information (e.g., age, gender) and email preferences.

Case Study

A national clothing retailer wanted to reactivate a large file of lapsed email addresses. The company wasn’t engaging with these inactive email addresses in large part due to the restraints of their existing email service provider, which enforced recency rules of email addresses. A dedicated ISP infrastructure was employed, as well as the execution of a custom deployment plan that included data enhancement, creative splits, personalization, testing/retesting of seed deployments, and suppression of client files.

As a result, 3.5 million email addresses were reactivated through data append and hygiene processes, enabling the client to grow its reach and engagement with the brand. These email addresses were added to the client’s daily email deployment plan.

The campaign generated:

• a 7:1 return on investment in terms of conversions/purchases;
• a 2.22 percent open rate;
• .61 percent clicks to be delivered; and
• 36 percent clicks-to-open.

Test Your Efforts and Don’t Give Up

Don’t give up if your emails aren’t opened immediately. Studies indicate that the average length of time between when people received a win-back email and when they read a subsequent message can be up to two months. Likewise, just because a subscriber doesn’t read your win-back campaign, doesn’t mean that they won’t read future messages. Even though subscribers may not have read a brand’s win-back campaign, almost half of subscribers read subsequent messages.

The key takeaway here is be patient, test your email campaigns and, remember, while there’s no magic formula, the efforts can pay off huge in the long run.

Since reactivation campaigns build upon prior marketing investments to re-engage buyers with some level of brand familiarity, they can deliver significant incremental revenue gains. A secondary benefit is an increase in these buyers receptivity to future campaigns.

By every measure, reactivation pays tremendous dividends when well executed, demonstrating that successful brands must view reactivation as an ongoing strategic tool rather than a one-and-done activity.

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

Imagine you're at a department store, and the employee who greets you at the door doesn't just say "If you need help, let me know," and let you shop. Instead, they follow you around through every aisle, rattling off information about every article of clothing you look at, and constantly ask, "Do you need help now?"

And while their intentions are probably good, their behavior reads more as desperate and invasive than noble and constructive. The same principle applies to B2B sales. Sometimes, reps can be exceedingly helpful and friendly, and while that might be perfectly pleasant in theory, it can undermine their efforts and actually lead to worse outcomes for buyers in practice.

Let's take a closer look at why being too helpful impedes sales and review some way-too-nice tendencies reps need to avoid when conducting their efforts.

Why Being Too Helpful Hurts Sales

In a world where buyers are constantly inundated with buying options and information, the majority of stress from B2B sales tends to fall on prospects. Every purchase they make comes with a lot to consider, and going with the wrong option can have some lasting consequences.

They're bound to be in a tough position, and for your sake and theirs, you're best off not making it any tougher. You need to empower your prospects, and that can be tricky to do. "Empower" might seem like one of those buzzwords that can be hard to define.

While that might be the case, I can tell you two actions that definitely don't fit that bill. Empowering doesn't mean totally forfeiting control of a conversation to a prospect — nor does it mean overloading potential customers with excessive attention and enthusiasm.

Empowerment in sales is the delicate art of guiding prospects without overwhelming them. It requires listening more than you talk, doing great discovery along the way, and giving back enough tailored information to make the buyer feel like their time with you is well spent.

If you're too passive or overbearing, you'll lose out on that balance. Unfortunately, some reps conflate those qualities with being helpful. And in those instances, being overly helpful becomes more of a detriment than an asset to effective sales efforts.

It's a buyer's world, and the object of a sale is to make the buying process as easy as possible for your prospects. That means offering direction with some room to breathe, and if you want to strike that balance, there are some tactics and tendencies you need to avoid when conducting your sales efforts.

1. Being Overly Responsive

Being too aggressive, overbearing, and persistent when responding to prospects is one of the most common "unhelpfully helpful" behaviors some reps exhibit. Your potential customers are professionals in their own right, so give them some credit. You don't have to walk them through absolutely everything when selling to them.

They probably don't need (or want) you to hold their hand through the buying process like they're a kid at a crosswalk — and that goes double for having you constantly trying to push them along. You need to be more calm, relevant, and rational with how you approach your outreach.

Take a more prescriptive approach. That means not only teaching prospects what and how to buy, but also offering very concrete, selective guidance on which information actually matters based on what they’ve told you. Let them know the specific options will deliver the greatest value, and be transparent about which ones won’t to help build trust.

Be mindful of which stakeholders need to be involved in the buying process and focus on them. Understand the questions they’re most likely to have and how best to answer those questions succinctly as they arise. Giving too much information can lead to a frustrating experience for the buyer and will leave them feeling like they haven’t been heard.

By no means am I saying you should ignore your prospects — I'm just recommending taking a second to consider how many times you've reached out to a prospect already and whether the information you want to offer will actually move the sale along.

2. Caring Too Much About Being Liked

B2B sales is about relationship building — not friendship building. It's not about finding buddies to go to movies and ride tandem bicycles through the park with. Ultimately, it's a professional engagement, rooted in conveying the value of your product or service.

It's not about your personal compatibility with a prospect — it's about their interests and what your business can do to serve them.

Caring too much about being liked often makes you lose sight of why you're talking to your prospect in the first place. Reps that struggle with this point often get fixated on establishing a personal bond with prospects as opposed to showing why their offering suits those prospects' needs better than the competition.

When this happens, a rep may come out of a meeting feeling like it went well while the buyer feels like it was a waste of their time – and worse yet, can’t be transparent with their feedback.

In these cases, reps need to understand why they're selling in the first place and be mindful of the fact that they're engaging in a business transaction — one that's taking place during work hours. They need to prioritize the sale above how well they personally vibe with the prospect.

Now, this doesn't mean that you have to be rude, arrogant, cold, or callous. You still want your prospects to like you to a certain extent — the point here is that needing prospects to love everything about you can't be your sole priority when conducting sales.

3. Being Overly Conflict-Averse

This point ties into the one above. A lot of the time, reps struggle with push-back and engaging in some give-and-take with prospects. They have a natural aversion to conflict, and it shows when they run into objections and tension.

Some reps think they're being helpful by backing down and avoiding confrontation, but it's important to bear in mind that conflict is natural and productive when handled correctly. They need to be willing to embrace discomfort and handle testy situations with tact and maturity.

Having a willingness to engage in constructive conflict is a mark of an exceptional salesperson. Reps need to be well-prepared and assertive enough to calmly and thoroughly address objections.

Being able to walk buyers through the reason an alternative solution or evaluation plan won’t work for them based on your previous experiences — in excruciating detail — is one of the most important tools a seller can have.

If you can't get uncomfortable in a sale every now and then, you're going to lose out on substantive conversations and opportunities to more sternly position your solution. You'll also have a harder time earning prospects' respect — and they’ll have a harder time learning how to buy. And if you flub all those elements, you're bound to miss some potential deals.

4. Dominating the Conversation

Sometimes, reps get a bit jumpy when conducting sales. They might be too excited, overzealous, or flat-out nervous and, in turn, become extremely talkative. In these cases, they might wind up dominating the conversation, overloading their prospects with irrelevant information, and not letting whoever is on the other side of it get a word in edgewise.

Sales isn't academia. In most cases, your engagements with prospects aren't lectures that run until the bell without any time for questions. The conversations you have with prospects are exactly that — conversations ... as in discussions involving multiple people.

You might think you're helping your prospect by offering your prospect a massive influx of information, pre-empting any potential objections you think they'll have, and rattling off every last bell and whistle your product or service has available. But in reality, you're probably frustrating and confusing them, or flat out losing their attention.

Take a deep breath. Let them air out their concerns, and respond accordingly. Embrace silence as a tool. Listen to them, and assure them that you're hearing what they have to say. As I said, conversations generally involve multiple people — let that be the case here.

5. Letting Prospects Dominate the Conversation

Even though talking over your prospects is a bad policy, the inverse is just as counterproductive. Letting your prospect say whatever they feel they need to say can feel helpful. It might seem like you're giving them a stake in the process — and that's important.

But there's a line between letting potential customers participate in the conversation and letting them dominate it. Don’t sit through a 15 minute monologue about technologies and pain points that are irrelevant to the conversation before directing the buyer to a more productive line of thought.

Remember, you're on this call for a reason — you have a job to do. You need to have a significant enough place in the discussion to effectively convey your value proposition and have a productive conversation.

If you sit idly by and let a prospect talk over you, you won't have the space to explain why you're even having the conversation in the first place. The key is to conduct your conversations with guidance and temper them with empathy.

Sternly direct the conversation while leaving room for objections and concerns, but always bear in mind that you're the one making the pitch, and they're the one considering it.

You can be assertive without being aggressive. Your first priority is demonstrating why your product or service is the best option for them. Make sure you address that, above all else.

I should clarify that this article is not an "anti-help" hit piece advocating for being cold and mean when conducting sales. You need to offer your prospects help, but there's a difference between help and hand-holding — and that goes double if that hand-holding is tight enough to hurt them.

Your prospects are professionals, and you need to treat them as such. Even though it's tempting to default to being too nice and getting anxious about silence or delayed responses, you need to remain composed and thoughtful. And if you're too helpful, you'll wind up being neither.

So you want to boost your B2B sales?

Well, gone are the days where one secret sales message or master technique worked magic for everyone that tried it.

Traditional sales techniques are working less and less nowadays as a result of new innovations in technology. According to industry professional, Logan Chierotti, who wrote recently wrote in Business 2 Community believes to compete in 2017 and beyond when there are an estimated 33 billion devices connected to the internet, “tailored content is what makes a sale. Personalization in today’s market may be more challenging, but it’s essential to stand out from the crowd.”

People have more access to information thanks to the internet than ever before. They can use their devices to research your company, product or service before you even give them your sales pitch. Personalization is important not just to B2C sales but to B2B as well. Tailoring and personalization can increase and improve sales. However, personalization is just one way to increase sales.

Design a Sales Process

Recently George Bronten, CEO of Membrain, in an article published on LinkedIn stated that, “despite compelling evidence that companies with a sales process sell more, many don’t have a documented one that is executed by everyone”, which means that without the structure that a sales process provides even the most experienced sales people will have opportunities fall through the cracks. Not having a structured sales process in place can cause longer sales cycles, and can cause junior sales people to make mistakes and other issues.

A quality sales process is one that is well designed, improves the skills of salespeople, allows the replication of best practices and minimizes risk for the buyer and seller. The sales process consists of stages, milestones, and activities.

Here is what a sales process might look like:

1. Segment your target customers
2. Prospect, research, and prequalify
3. Engage
4. Understand your buyer
5. Position with value and priority
6. Drive consensus and commitment
7. Deliver on promises

It is important to add key activities and buyer-focused milestones once you have outlined the stages in the sales process. Key activities are the activities that your salespeople will actually perform so they need to be hammered home.

Know your competition

When it comes to your competitors do you truly know who you are up against? Not knowing your competitors and ignoring them can cause you to lose a sale. At the end of the day and when push comes to shove, the only thing standing in the way of a sale is the competition.

In B2B sales, there are usually three types of competitors.

The Status Quo

According to Bob Apollo, who wrote on LinkedIn the first competitor can be described as the status quo. “No matter how interested the prospect might appear to be, unless and until they perceive the pain and risks of change to be far less than the costs and risks of sticking with their current situation, they will almost inevitably conclude that they might as well stick with what they already have.”

If the customer perceives change as riskier, more painful, and more costly they will stick to what they have. In order to defeat the status quo, you have to give everyone involved in the buying a process a compelling need for action. It has to be something that they can buy into. It has to be personalized to each buyer.

Other Companies Like Yours

Once there is a compelling reason to change the status quo, the second competitor is competition—meaning other companies such as yours.

In this phase, it is important to shape the buyer’s vision of a solution. It is about knowing what the buyer’s vision of a solution is. Do you represent that vision at the solution level and at the company level? The sale will go to the one who shaped the buyer’s vision of their future solution. If your competitor gets there first then they will be the one to shape the buyer’s vision. At that point, it will be too late to reshape that vision.

Competing Priorities

The third competitor is a company’s priorities. Companies don’t have unlimited resources to invest in every project. Even if the project has a budget there is no guarantee that the money will be spent.

If your customer sees something that they feel is more important than your project then it’s highly likely that your project will be cancelled or put on hold – that’s why understanding how your customer prioritizes their work is important. Understanding and identifying high-level competition, even within a company’s day-to-day operations, is critical for successful sales.

Personalization

Personalization is necessary in order to stand out from the crowd. Businesses that leverage personalization have higher conversion rates by an average of 40%.

Personalization isn’t exactly a new tactic. Salespeople in 2012 who engaged in social media outperformed their colleagues by 78%.

Here is how you can apply it to your business:

• Personalized Loyalty or rewards programs aren’t just for B2C companies. They can be used in B2B as well. Loyalty programs are a great way to reward frequent customers. You can offer discounts or anything that will encourage them to come back.
• Use CRM software to get a deeper understanding for your customers. CRM software provides many ways to personalize customer relationships and provides your salespeople with all of the information that they need. It also allows you to setup regular communications with prospects and leads and even send special offers to select customers when the timing is ideal.

Personalization should be done right away. According to a survey conducted in 2015, personalized offers lead up to a 400 percent increase in the likelihood of responses from prospects and leads. It also leads to higher conversion rates and builds brand loyalty.

Get in the Right Mindset

Another reason why B2B teams don’t win as many deals as they should is that they are out of sync. It is important for marketing and sales to be in the right mindset.

The first step to achieving this is everyone agreeing on who the target market is and what the buyer persona looks like. Your team’s answers should be definitive and actionable. Statements such as “I want to sell to everyone” do not hit the mark. You need to be specific so that you can target with effective strategies.

The key is to be specific about who your target market is.

According to a post in Business 2 Community, written by visionary entrepreneurial marketing leader, Peter Buscemi, “the best way for marketing to be truly integrated with sales is to stack the deck—focus all outbound efforts against a database that only contains potential MQLs”.

An MQL is a marketing qualified lead. In order for anyone to be a qualified lead, they have to meet certain criteria first. Some marketers will create a qualified lead-based scoring. Behavioural and social activity are key indicators of what may constitute a qualified lead. Ideally, if both marketing and sales follow the same guidelines, they will both be on the same page, and your salespeople will be set up for success.

Overcoming B2B Obstacles

There can be many B2B sales obstacles. For example, Matt Haag, Owner of SimpleData, wrote in a recent post, that not getting enough visitors to your site, long buying cycles, and no personalization are all obstacles that will prevent you from boosting your B2B sales.

Not knowing who your competition is and not having synchronization between marketing and sales teams will prevent sales. However, when you give your customers a personalized experience, have a synced marketing and sales team, know your competitors, and have a well-designed sales process, you will have a more efficient business and see an obvious uptick in sales.

Right now there is a war. The war is over mindshare and preference.

If you want to competitively displace your dream client’s current partner, you first have to command a greater share of mind. You have to shape their thinking about the results they are producing now, the results they need to produce, and what is necessary to produce those results. Your measure of mindshare is the measure of how compelled your dream client is to change from the status quo, the devil they know, to something new, the devil they have not yet met—but surely will, if they decide to change.

Mindshare isn’t limited to an individual stakeholder. It isn’t limited to a power sponsor, or champion, or however your methodology categorizes the single individual that I call the CEO of the Problem, the person whose responsibility it is to produce results in the area where you make a difference. You need vertical mindshare, North and South. You need it inside the department where you do most of your work, as well as horizontal mindshare — all of the other departments who are going to be impacted by any decision to change — and who can kill a change initiative by defending the status quo.

Mindshare is what leads to preference, something we don’t spend enough time thinking about, talking about, or working on when it comes to sales. To win a deal, your dream client has to prefer you to doing nothing, to alternatives, and to your competitors. They have to want to add you and your team to their team. They have to believe that they are better off with you than they are with their current provider, something different, or one of your competitors.

If you make sales, you spend a lot of time calling on clients, and you work to create and capture opportunities.

• If you rely on your product, your service, or your solution to win the battle for mindshare and preference, you are going to be sorely disappointed. What you sell isn’t going to be enough.
• If you depend on your pricing, you are going to be defeated by those who have decided to compete for mindshare and preference, and who can justify the delta with better results, and who can tie what they are doing to your dream client’s bigger strategy.

Winning deals now means winning the war for mindshare and creating a dominating preference.

The post The War for Mindshare and Preference appeared first on The Sales Blog.

And now, a brief message from Captain Obvious and his sidekick, Sidekick Boy:

The goal of marketing is to generate leads that convert to sales, thereby generating revenue.

What a thunderously, crashingly obvious statement! Captain Obvious saves the day again.

But seriously, it’s useful for marketers to occasionally contemplate this most fundamental truth about our profession. We’re not here to just raise awareness, get subscribers, or foster engagement. All of these goals should be parts of a strategy to get to the ultimate goal: lead generation.

We have more tools now than ever before to measure how our efforts translate to leads. Unfortunately, that means marketers—especially in B2B—are under more pressure than ever to improve the quantity and quality of the leads we deliver to sales.

To boost your lead generation efforts, you don’t have to torch your entire content marketing strategy. Start with these easy wins and expand from there.

10 Easy Wins to Improve B2B Lead Generation 

#1: Use SlideShare for Increased Conversion Rates

SlideShare leads tend to be higher converting than leads from other social media sources. If your content is featured on the site, it’s a guaranteed boost in traffic. Create high-quality, visually compelling content with a strong CTA at the end, and you can drive relevant traffic to your landing page.

This SlideShare on Influencer Engagement was a great lead driver for our agency. We saw results for both of our dual CTAs.

SlideShare offers a pay-per-capture embedded lead gen form option as well. If your potential ROI is high enough, it’s worth using their native format to simplify conversion. Otherwise, a clickable link in the last few slides is the way to go.

#2: Mobile-Optimize Your Landing Pages

It’s easy now to create mobile-optimized social media advertising. All the major networks have a native format for paid content that looks just as good on mobile as it does on the desktop. But when a mobile user taps on the ad to visit your site, what does the landing page look like?

Make sure your landing page is designed to be responsive, or use a mobile-specific landing page to put your best foot forward. The page should be light on text, with no need to scroll or zoom to read. A sentence or two with a clear statement of benefit, a short form, and a submission button are all that should be on the page.

#3: Add CTAs to High-Performing Content

It’s easy to add new content in an attempt to get more eyeballs on your landing pages. But if you’re not refreshing existing content, you’re likely missing out on potential leads.

Check your analytics for older content that is still bringing in traffic. Give the content a refresh, then update the CTA to a current relevant offer.

I’ve seen far too many posts that CTA to, for example, register for a webinar that has already passed. Keep your CTAs fresh on old posts and they can continue to drive leads.

#4: Balance Top and Bottom-of-funnel CTAs

We’ve all heard the old axiom, “Don’t propose marriage on the first date.” It’s one of Captain Obvious’ favorite quotes. But it does hold true for lead generation.

For top-of-funnel CTAs, make the process as easy and frictionless as possible. Ask for a bare minimum of information and provide plenty of value in return. A blog subscription CTA is a prime example. They give an email address, you provide a newsletter with (hopefully) personalized, segmented content.

Bottom-of-funnel CTAs should require a little extra effort—that way, you’ll weed out those who aren’t ready for more commitment. For example, a “schedule a demo” link at the top of your homepage isn’t likely to get results. But a demo request at the bottom of your “About Us” or “Learn More” page should be more successful.

#5: Take the “Squint Test”

Your site visitors can’t convert if they don’t know where to click. It’s easy to get a little too into design elements and end up burying the CTA.

Look at your website and squint until you can’t read the text (or, in my case, just remove your glasses). Can you tell where the CTA is? If not, it’s likely that your readers can’t either.

#6: Refresh Your Personas

If your content isn’t converting, or if it’s converting leads that don’t end up qualified by sales, it’s time to take a look at the personas that inform the content. Personas aren’t meant to be set in stone; they should change over time as you experiment and explore your target audience.

Revisit your personas on a regular basis, evaluating them based on sales department feedback, keyword research, and content performance. Keep the content relevant and it’s likely your CTAs will be relevant, too.

#7: Diversify Your Content Mix

A B2B buying committee tends to have multiple stakeholders with differing interests and pain points. Factor in those who don’t make the final decision but influence the process, and you have a lot of different potential audiences.

So it’s important to make sure your content speaks to the interests of everyone involved in the decision-making process. You may never get the CEO to download your eBook—but the Human Resources Manager who does download it is likely to share what they learn.

#8: Try Audience-Specific Webinars

If your organization hasn’t tried hosting a webinar yet, it’s high time to give it a shot. According to research, up to 40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads.

Use webinars to speak to a single segment of your audience, providing value that is exceptionally relevant to their needs. Publish a preview blog post with a registration link, then promote the event with paid and organic social, too.

#9: Add a “Download” Option to Top Content

This one is as simple as it is effective. On your longer pieces of ungated content, give people the option to download it for offline viewing later. It’s surprising to see how many people will happily trade a little contact info for a downloadable PDF of content they find valuable.

#10: Analyze and Optimize Your Conversion Rate

There are two ways to increase the net amount of leads your landing pages bring in: increase traffic, or improve your conversion rate. While both are worthwhile goals, the latter will have far more impact than the former. Capture a larger percentage of your traffic, and you’ll end up with more and more relevant leads.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an entire discipline unto itself, but there are plenty of CRO tools that can help you measure and improve your rate.

Take the Lead in Lead Generation

As Captain Obvious would say, the goal of marketing is to encourage sales that lead to revenue. Every marketing tactic should serve that ultimate goal. Use the tips in this article to start capturing more and higher-quality leads. And remember: Capturing a lead is the beginning, not the end. Make sure your lead nurturing strategy is on point, too.

Need help with conversion rate optimization? Explore our analytics & CRO services.

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The post 10 Easy Wins to Improve Your B2B Marketing Leads appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

You have invested a significant amount of time, money, and energy into an opportunity. Then the buyer says they want to “think it over.” What should you do?

Maybe it’s easier to begin with what you shouldn’t do. All too often, salespeople simply agree to postpone the decision and check in later.

If we’re feeling particularly brave, we may even suggest a date and time for the next contact. This approach typically leads to a cycle of delays, miscommunication, and potentially some evasion by the prospect. Neither party benefits.

Determining exactly where you stand is far more effective. Use any of these five questions to identify your prospect’s reservations and propose a mutually beneficial agreement.

1. Identify the three most likely obstacles and ask the prospect to choose one

“That’s totally understandable. Most of our customers need time to think it through. Could it be that you’re worried about the cost, implementation, or not being too sure about what you’ve heard from us?"

Stop talking after you say this. Wait for the prospect to identify which of the three obstacles they are concerned about or identify another reason that’s keeping them from moving forward.

2. Ask for permission to speak candidly

“Hmm. If I believed that you were making the wrong decision, how might I tell you that without you getting upset?”

The other person always asks you to go ahead and speak your mind. Focus on the biggest emotional pain in this person’s world you have identified that you can solve, and explore the financial implications of leaving that problem unaddressed.

3. Get a reality check

“Most of the time I when hear, ‘Let me think about it,’ what people really mean is ‘No thanks.’ Can you tell me is that what’s happening here today?”

Many salespeople are afraid to pose this question because they believe they are somehow “planting a negative thought” in the prospect’s mind. David Sandler, the founder of Sandler Training, used to say, “You can’t lose what you don’t have.” If you need a reality check, ask for one.

Ironically, posing this question usually gives you the information you need to rescue the sale. You’ll learn if there is a chance of working together. If there is not, it is better to know now before you waste any more time.

4. Request the next step

“Okay, well that makes sense. I think I’d be saying the same to you about now. What should we do next so that I properly understand when and if I should follow up, or just close the file and move on?”

The beauty of this approach is that you are agreeing with the prospect -- and using that agreement to clarify exactly what will happen next. You’re trying to secure a mutual understanding about what you’re each agreeing to do, and when.

Maybe you get the opportunity to schedule a phone conversation for next week, at which point the prospect commits to giving you a final decision. That’s better than having no idea what’s happening.

5. Set a timeframe

“Makes sense. Tell me, if I don’t hear back from you by [date], what should I do?”

This question is probably the simplest and most direct option on this list, and thus the one you may want to try first. It’s easy to remember, easy to ask, and encourages the prospect to share what’s going on. Try it. You may be surprised at how much good information you uncover and at the new avenues of opportunity that emerge.

6. Ask what will change

"Interesting. Can I ask what specifically you'll be thinking over? How can I help you think through those points right now?"

Many times, when a prospect wants to "think it over," it's to consider the information they already have or dwell on areas where they're unsure about your product. It's not constructive for them to do this on their own. Help them "think it over" on the phone and facilitate clearer decision making.

7. Check on key stakeholders

"I understand. As you and your team are considering your final decision, is there anyone who's on the fence I should speak with? Are there talking points I can arm you with in these conversations?"

In the final stage of the decision making process, your prospect will likely convene with other key stakeholders to make a final vendor choice.

This is your last opportunity to give prospects the talking points they need to be your champion in this meeting. Ask if there's anyone else you should speak with, and be willing to offer any last-minute support your prospect requires.

8. Tell them you'll follow up

"Great. I'll follow up with you on Monday. How does that sound?"

Your prospect may "think it over" until the opportunity has passed. To avoid this, set a firm timeline for yourself while setting expectations for your prospect. They know you'll expect them to have a decision by the time you touch base. So, give them a realistic timeline (five-to-seven business days) that allots enough time for them to meet with other stakeholders.

If they haven't made a decision by that time, set fresh expectations and move your timeline up to create a sense of urgency.

For more tips on avoiding common sales traps, download our free white paper, Three Biggest Sales Mistakes You Should Never Make.

According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the artificial intelligence (AI) market is projected to grow to $153 billion by 2020. If you’re in sales, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise; science has been changing sales as we know it with the recent growth of predictive analytics, prescriptive insights and more.

However, the evolution of AI in sales has resulted in a slew of new and sometimes confusing vocabulary words. That’s why we’ve compiled the below glossary, which breaks down all of the AI-related sales terms you need to know to navigate this brave new world.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the ability of computers to analyze information, accomplish tasks and make decisions like a person would. Some of the most notable traits of AI, derived from the components of human intelligence, are learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception and language understanding.

Big Data

The fuel of AI. Big data refers to the vast pool of information created due to the explosion of digital and the continued growth of social networks, connected devices and mobile technology.

Descriptive Data

The first evolution of sales intelligence. Descriptive data describes what is happening with your sales performance at a given time in response to a particular query.

Dimensions

Dimensions are all of the factors or variables that impact and make up a sale. Examples of dimensions include sales team, stage duration, company vertical, lead source, deal size, etc. Segmenting your sales pipeline or deals by various dimensions can uncover underlying trends, patterns or variables affecting your sales growth.

Machine Learning

Machine learning enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. It works by searching through large volumes of data to identify patterns and then applying what has been learned to new data.

Natural Language Processing

The ability of computers to decode and understand the meaning behind human language patterns over time.

Predictive Analytics

The second generation of sales intelligence. Predictive analytics uses historical data and machine learning capabilities to anticipate what will happen in the future, providing capabilities around lead scoring, sales forecasting, email sentiment and more.

Prescriptive Insights

The third and most recent generation of sales intelligence. Prescriptive insights provide specific recommendations as to the actions that can be taken to achieve particular sales outcomes. They are derived by dynamically codifying and analyzing millions of data points at once to isolate the key dimensions impacting your sales performance.

Sales Formula

Provides a consistent and reliable way to measure and evaluate your sales strategy over time across key conversion points needed to turn a lead into a closed deal. While each company has its own unique iteration, the baseline formula and definitions for its variables is as follows:

L x %LW x %LWC x %OW x %WR x Avg($Deal)
L: Number of Leads
The total of leads that have been generated by marketing or sales but have not yet
been qualified for the sales pipeline.
%LW: Percentage of Leads Worked
The percentage of leads that has been acted upon by sales.
%LWC: Percentage of Leads Worked Converted to Opportunities
The percentage of worked leads that have been converted to opportunities (or “deals”) and have been identified as having revenue potential.
%OW: Percentage of Opportunities Worked
The percentage of opportunities that are actually worked by your sales team and
continue to the next stage of the sales pipeline
%WR: Percent Win Rate for Worked Opportunities
The percentage of worked opportunities that become won deals, or customers.
Avg ($Deal): Average Deal Size
The sum of all new sales revenue in a given period of time divided by the number of new
customers or deals.

Sales Genome

A unique codification of a company’s historical sales data and activities. The sales genome provides the basis for deriving prescriptive insights into which factors or dimensions should be measured and monitored most closely within the sales pipeline and process, and what specific levers can be pulled to improve results.

Structured Data

Structured data refers to information that is highly organized and can be captured in predefined database fields, such as first name, last name, email address, company name, etc.

Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence leverages the latest in data processing and artificial intelligence to uncover insights with the potential to inform decision-making and guide sales performance.

Sales Science

An emerging field of sales dedicated to accurately measuring, scaling and refining growth using a distinct combination of formulas, analysis and tools designed to uncover actionable, quantifiable insights.

Sales Scientist

A sales and data expert who helps establish effective sales processes, drive team adoption, develop a unique formula for success and generate actionable, quantifiable insights.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured data encapsulates all of the data that cannot be neatly packaged in a predefined way, and represents the majority of big data. Examples of unstructured data include voice recordings, emails, social media postings and much more.

Learn More

Ready to start digging in and learning more about how to leverage AI to transform your business? Our brand new Sales Intelligence Buyer’s Kit offers a collection of materials designed to help you gain a deeper understanding of AI in sales, evaluate your current sales intelligence savvy and put the right tactics and tools in place for your team to get ahead. Download your free kit below!

Does the content you create burrow into brains, slam into cells, and trigger an exciting cavalcade of chemicals? If it tells a great story, it can.

But marketers often confuse information for story. Marketing campaigns, direct mail, email newsletters help you do much more than simply relay information. They are communication tools that help you establish a connection with your audience.

In an ideal world, every interaction with your audience leaves a lasting impression. In reality, only those interactions that foster a connection do. So, what’s the most efficient shortcut to that connection? Brand storytelling.

We want to help you make the strongest impact with every piece of content you create, so we’re diving into the science of brand storytelling to teach you how to tell stories that will make the most impact with your audience.

Building Trust Through Brand Storytelling

Before we dive into the science of brand storytelling, let’s address the ultimate goal of all content: to build a relationship with your customers. We know consumers want to work with brands whose values they share, who can provide expert advice and take consumers from point A to point B as painlessly as possible. But the road from passive consumer to active customer starts with your relationship.

Content is one of the best ways to establish a relationship. You may use it to demonstrate your knowledge, help your audience do something, or introduce your culture or brand. No matter the subject, you want to deliver that message in the most effective manner. This is where brand storytelling gives you an advantage.

When you translate your message into compelling stories, you are speaking in a language that your audience’s brains and bodies instinctively understand. This intrinsic recognition is what fosters their connection to you. It’s what tells them you are a familiar friend—not a nuisance to ignore.

The Science Behind Brand Storytelling

Humans are scientifically hardwired for stories—think of the earliest cave paintings. But why? Why do stories captivate us? Because they affect our biology. A good story isn’t just an entertaining experience. It’s a physical experience that affects our emotions and—most importantly—can change our behavior.

This is well demonstrated in the work of Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist and professor at Claremont Graduate University, who is a pioneer in the study of stories and their effect on humans.

In a 2015 study, Zak tested the power of story and its effect on charitable giving. He had participants watch motion graphics delivering two types of stories: 1) a dramatic narrative about a father and son 2) a simple story depicting the father and son at the zoo. After viewing the stories, participants were invited to donate money to strangers.

The study revealed the powerful affect of storytelling. The dramatic narrative caused viewers’ brains to release two incredibly powerful chemicals: oxytocin and cortisol.

Why? The experience of hearing and seeing a human narrative allowed viewers to put themselves in the story, which increased their oxytocin and, therefore, empathy. (This also aligns with neural coupling, in which the brain activity of someone listening to a story begins to mirror the person who’s telling the story.)

While oxytocin is the feel-good “love” chemical, the conflict in the narrative increased cortisol, the stress chemical. This may sound negative, but cortisol is important because stress causes humans to be on high alert and pay attention, making the viewers more invested in the story. Combined, these two chemicals not only shaped emotions but influenced viewer behavior.

After viewing the dramatic narrative, viewers were more eager to donate money. (The power of these chemicals also confirmed findings of Zak’s 2007 study, in which participants injected with oxytocin became 80% more generous.)

Additional research has also found storytelling to be a useful behavior-changing tool. A 2011 University of Massachusetts Medical study found that storytelling swayed patients to better control their blood pressure. And a 2013 Penn State study found that storytelling helped improve medical students’ attitudes toward treating dementia patients.

Connection, trust, empathy, action: This is the inherent power of storytelling—if you tell the right story.

The Formula for Great Brand Storytelling

Now, here’s the kicker. Remember that Zak presented two stories to the viewers. That dramatic narrative contained conflict and resolution. The second, about the father and the son at the zoo, had none. It basically just followed their actions: visiting one animal, then the next. There was no compelling narrative to trigger those chemicals.

But the dramatic story full of conflict, struggle, and tension captured the audience. Therefore, the key to good brand storytelling is a stimulating story.

According to Zak, there are two keys to a powerful story:

1. It needs to capture attention.
2. It should transport us to the world.

A 2014 Johns Hopkins study of popular Super Bowl ads found that the key to popularity wasn’t humor or a crazy stunt, it was the type of stories that followed a dramatic arc. For this, let’s refer to Gustav Freytag’s pyramid, which you might remember this from English class.

This classic story structure includes:

Exposition: This sets the scene, detailing who or what the story is about.

Rising action: These are the events that lead to the climax, the conflict, etc.

Climax: This is the turning point.

Falling Action: This is where the conflict unravels.

Denouement: This is the resolution.

This is the most satisfying story structure because it provides everything we crave: intrigue, action, and resolution. (Note that a great ending or resolution triggers a release dopamine, the feel-good reward chemical.)

How to Apply the Arc to Brand Storytelling

It may seem like this structure is difficult to master in marketing, as opposed to a novel or screenplay, but there are plenty of practical applications for marketing, both internally and externally.

Storytelling can be used for:

• • Sales collateral: Case studies or other content to prove your benefit.
  • Education: Blogs, articles, infographics, explainer videos, or any instance in which you need to communicate concepts clearly.
  • Entertainment: Content to delight customers or communicate your brand personality.
  • Culture Marketing: Content to tell the story of who you are to current/potential customers and/or employees.
  • Behavior influence: You may use storytelling for positive reinforcement (to increase a behavior) or negative reinforcement (to prevent a behavior).

No matter the application, you can apply the elements of a dramatic narrative to every piece of content you create. Here are 6 ways to do it:

1. Vet your ideas: To make sure you’re telling the most compelling story possible, ask yourself:
   • Why do I want to tell this story?
   • What’s my unique angle?
   • What value will this provide to my audience?
   • What should my audience take away from this?
2. Tell a single story: Don’t confuse the reader by trying to put too much in. A single, powerful narrative is more effective than 10 random anecdotes.
3. Tell stories your audience will relate to: A good story triggers empathy and connection, but you can make it even more enticing by telling stories about subjects your audience is already interested in. Craft content around the issues, interests, or pain points your audience regularly faces. (Find out how to build audience personas which will help you identify these.)
4. Start with an emotional hook: Use the first 100 words of your article or 15 seconds of your video to grab their attention and trigger that oxytocin and cortisol. Pro-tip: Conflict always creates an emotional response and personal anecdotes, powerful statistics, or provocative questions are a great way to do this.
5. Create a setup and payoff: Remember that the story resolution triggers that reward response. If you can lead with an emotional hook, get them invested in the story, they’ll want to follow it through to the end.
6. Be human: Empathy is a human emotion. Make sure your brand voice, language, and empathy is also reflected in the way you tell your story.

Brand storytelling can be challenging and exciting, but always remember the real reason you’re telling stories: To foster a connection and build a strong, trusting relationship.

Over two years ago, we shared with BuzzPlant Blog readers how companies were making $6.50 for every $1.00 spent on influencer marketing. Today, influencer marketing is hotter than ever, according to a new infographic from Influencer Marketing Hub, which reports a +325% increase in searches for “influencer marketing” over the last 12 months!

However, it’s not just search interest that’s growing. Actual use of the strategy is rapidly growing in popularity. Influencer Marketing Hub reports that businesses are seeing an average $7.65 earned media value per every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Let’s revisit this explanation from a post earlier this spring (The Women Who Run Instagram):

1. A creator has an audience with whom he or she has established trust.
2. You partner with that creator to share your brand.
3. Your brand gets exposure to a targeted audience through a vetted medium, which can result in sales, a lift in awareness, goal-completion, etc.

Essentially, influencer marketing allows brands to bypass traditional advertising routes, which force a trust-building process; brands can go straight to a targeted audience through a trusted medium (the “influencer”). With influencer marketing, you don’t have to work quite as hard to convince an audience that you’re legitimate. By partnering with an influencer, who’s already worked hard for that audience’s trust, you have an “in” that you wouldn’t be able to achieve as quickly on your own with a cold lead.

How Dedicated Are Marketers?

Today, 37% of marketers surveyed say they have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing. (For comparison, 57% have stand-alone budgets for content marketing.)

Over the next 12 months…

• 67% of marketers will increase their influencer marketing budget
• 13% will maintain their budget
• 16% are unsure
• And only 4% say they will decrease their budget

It’s All About Instagram

As we reported a few weeks ago, 91.9% of influencers say Instagram is their #1 platform. Instagram’s influencer market size was estimated at $700M last year, is on track for $1.2B this year, and is projected to top out at $1.7B in 2018.

By researching hashtags commonly used by Instagram influencers (#ad, #sponsored and #spon), Influencer Marketing Hub has determined that we’ll see 12.9M brand-sponsored posts on Instagram this year – that’s more than three times 2015’s 3.6M posts and nearly double 2016’s 6.8M posts.

Why Instagram? A lot of it comes down to engagement. A study of 100,000+ influencer profiles across Instagram and Twitter found incredible differences in engagement rates. Accounts with fewer than 5,000 users, for example, saw an average 5.7% engagement rate on Instagram, while accounts of the same size on Twitter received a paltry 1.45% engagement rate.

So, where would you go?

Do You Use Instagram Marketing?

If so, how’s it working for you? If not, what’s keeping you from testing the waters? Tell us in the comments below!

 Take this at face value: Detroit has 50% more venture-backed startups than it did three years ago. This comes from a study (PDF) from the Michigan Venture Capital Association (MVCA) which found there are 35 active venture-backed startups in Detroit. Sure, that’s not a huge number compared to other regions, but the growth is notable. I live in the great state of Michigan and can attest to… Read More

There’s something to be said for thorough, extensively researched buyer personas.

When you’ve taken the time to answer 150 questions about your target customers, there’s no way the content written for them and the way you market to them won’t resonate.

The data backs this up. Katie Sweet, writing for IBM’s THINK Marketing blog, shares some insight that proves how important understanding your customers is to your marketing campaign’s success, including this statistic: 63% of consumers say they would think more positively about a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting, or relevant.

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63% of consumers would think more positively about a brand if it gave them valuable #content via @RaptMedia.
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Clearly, customer insight is key. If you have the time for extensive buyer personas, that’s great.
But what if it doesn’t take answering 150 questions to achieve this necessary level of understanding?

There is a better way.

These questions won’t give you the same thorough understanding you’d get by meticulously filling out a customer persona template, but as you’ll see, they will help you dive into the mindset of your target audience members.

The three questions are:

• What is the first thing my customer thinks about in the morning?
• What is the last thing my customer thinks about at night?
• Why?

These might sound overly simplistic, but stick with me. There’s a method to this madness.

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Buyer persona hack: What’s first thing customers think in morning, at night, & why, says @IamAaronAgius.
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What is the first thing my customer thinks about in the morning?

Think about the way you wake up in the morning. What do you think about first?

If you’re like most people, chances are you think about what’s on your schedule for the day. Maybe you’re feeling frustrated about going to a job you hate. Maybe you’re stressed about a big presentation. Or maybe you’re excited about spending time with your family or working on a project you love.

What is the last thing my customer thinks about at night?

Now, think about how you typically feel at the end of the day.

Rather than thinking about the micro-events of your upcoming days, night-time thoughts tend to occur on a macro level. You aren’t thinking about the appointments in your planner – you’re reflecting on whether you’re happy with your life or whether you should make changes to everything from your social life to your career and more.

Why?

The “why” question is a bit nebulous; every person has different reasons for making the choices or having the feelings they do. But digging into this question is what makes this exercise so powerful.

Let’s go through an example so you can see what I mean:

Meet Mark

Mark is a member of the target audience for my marketing agency – he’s the marketing manager of an enterprise brand.

What is the first thing Mark thinks about in the morning?

When Mark rolls out of bed, he’s worried.

He has a big meeting coming up with his boss – the vice president of marketing – who is stressed about how the department’s performance looks to other members of the C-suite. There has been talk of spending freezes, and both Mark and his vice president are anxious to justify their work and the choices they’ve made.

What is the last thing Mark thinks about at night?

At the end of the day, Mark is somewhat relieved. His meeting went well, but he can’t shake the nagging feeling that, although he was able to put out one fire, another one will be right around the corner.

He’s frustrated. He took this job because of the great pay, but the stress of it is affecting his time with his family and friends. He wonders if he really can make it work, or if he should start looking elsewhere for new opportunities.

Why?

Mark was worried in the morning because he wasn’t confident in the ability of the agencies he’s hired to drive results – and he’s afraid those decisions will reflect poorly on him.

He wants to do a good job, and he wants his performance to reflect well enough to help him move up the ladder at his company. But at the same time, he’s frustrated because his work is getting in the way of other things in his life he deems important.

Marketing to Mark

I didn’t answer hundreds of questions about whether or not Mark has a dog at home, what his hobbies are, or whether he’s carrying student loan debt.

But I have enough insight to understand what matters to Mark and his current frustrations to build content tailored to his needs and pain points.

Knowing what I know about Mark, I could write company blog posts on titles such as:

• Selling the C-Suite: Making the Business Case for External Marketing Agencies
• The 5 Monthly Reports Your Marketing Agency Should Be Providing You
• 10 Tips for Separating Successful Marketing Agencies from Scam Artists
• What It Means to Be a Fully Transparent Marketing Agency (And Why You Should Choose One for Your Next Project)
• Handling Agency Conflict: What to Do When Results Fall Short

Each of these proposed titles supports a concern or pain point I identified in Mark’s life, using the answers to the three questions. (These are hypothetical and somewhat off the cuff; I would refine them based on competitive research data on content already published.)

The topics may not all be winners, but taken together they give the clear impression that I understand Mark’s needs and how they could be met.

When you don’t know your Mark

In the example, I base my assumptions about Mark on past experiences I’ve had with my customers. If you aren’t your target audience, you’ll need to do a bit more digging to find how they would answer the questions.

Sure, you could guess – and you might get close. But why not take the time to look through sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers, public Facebook Groups in your industry, or industry-specific forums to find the questions people are asking and the language they’re using?

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Use sites like @quora or @yahoo to find the questions people are asking, says @IAmAaronAgius.
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For example, if I were researching Mark, I might start a query for “routines” on Inbound.org:

By opening each thread, I could get answers about how marketers structure their days.

Pairing these results with other hot topics (found on Inbound.org under “Top Content”) would give me a better idea of what marketers’ top concerns are and what they’re struggling with:

From here, I can start to answer my three questions:

• What is the first thing my customer thinks about in the morning?
• What is the last thing my customer thinks about at night?
• Why?

I won’t be as confident in the answers as I would if I had real-world experience working with this audience, but the process gives me a starting point to create content without wasting time answering dozens of demographic questions.

Conclusion

Will your content and messaging benefit from more detailed buyer personas rather than ones derived from the three questions? Of course. More information is almost always better when it comes to marketing.

But there are trade-offs to consider. Time spent researching endless details and creating fully fleshed out customer avatars is time you aren’t creating content or actively marketing. And that time has a cost in terms of missed opportunities resulting from your delays.

In my opinion, you need to find a balance. Use the three questions to kick off your content planning and to inform your early marketing messages. As you gather content performance data, use it to further develop your buyer persona.

For example, if multiple articles around a single topic perform poorly, you may need to explore other facets of your audience – add and answer more questions about your buyer. But keep moving forward. Don’t wait to have a perfect understanding of your audience to start creating the content they need to see.

Would you use these three questions in lieu of a full buyer persona? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave me a note in the comments.

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Cover image by Nick Karvounis via Unsplash

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

The post Hacking Your Buyer Personas: The Only 3 Questions You Need to Ask appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

In any other context, asking about someone’s personal goals, fears, desires, and obstacles shortly after meeting them would probably earn you some strange looks -- if they didn’t walk away, that is.

But in sales, we regularly reach out to prospects, introduce ourselves, and then start delving into sensitive information about our prospects’ lives.

The discovery and qualification process will lead to better insights and more accurate information if the buyer trusts you. However, depending on the length of your sales cycle, you may not have much time to establish trust and build rapport.

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I’ve learned to frame my questions a specific way to get the information I need without making buyers uncomfortable. Read on to learn my techniques.

Rather than asking, “What results are you seeing from X?”, ask, “How’s it going?”

This is a powerful formula for getting prospects to open up. First, make an objective observation about the business area, campaign, or project related to your product, such as, “I see on your Careers page that you’re currently looking to hire five customer support representatives.”

Whether they say yes or no, respond, “How’s it going?”

Unlike “What results are you seeing?” -- which puts the buyer on the spot and pressures them to paint a rosy picture -- this casual question makes them more comfortable. You’ll typically receive an honest, unfiltered summary of what’s going well and what’s not.

Rather than asking, “What keeps you up at night?”, ask, “Many of my customers are focused on X, Y, and Z. Are you tackling any of those?”

It’s not just clichéd to ask what’s keeping your prospect up -- it’s also ineffective. What if they name a challenge your product can’t solve? What if they can’t think of anything off the top of their head? What if they’re doing well, and your biggest opportunity is helping them be even more successful?

The second version works for all these scenarios. First, if the buyer is experiencing a specific challenge or launching a specific initiative, this question shows them they’re not alone. Second, it subtly establishes your expertise. Third, if their answer is “No, I’m not dealing with any of those,” you can respond, “That’s excellent -- the best time to solve a problem is before you actually have it.”

Rather than asking, “Why haven’t you addressed this issue already?”, ask, “Have you tried to solve this before?”

Although normally I wouldn’t ask a close-ended question, it’s helpful in this situation for probing into your prospect’s potential inaction.

For instance, maybe they came very close to building an in-house solution a few months ago -- but ultimately decided it would be too expensive. You might blow past this detail if you assume talking to you is the first thing they’ve done about the situation.

Rather than asking, “What’s your budget for this?”, ask, “To make sure we’re a good fit for you, can you give me a sense of your general price point?”

Immediately demanding your prospect’s budget can come across too aggressively. In addition, they might not have decided yet what they’d like to spend. You don’t want to ignore the budget question entirely; after all, it’s a waste of everyone’s time if your product is way out of reach. Help the buyer understand why you’re asking with this more diplomatic version.

Rather than asking, “When do you need this up and running?”, ask, “When do you need to see [desired results]?”

For every purchase, there are three main milestones: When your prospect actually buys, when the product is installed or delivered, and when they’ll start seeing results.

Identifying that third date is key. The buyer probably isn’t thinking about the gap between implementation and impact, and if you don’t remind them, they’ll feel less urgency. Plus, you want to work on their schedule -- not yours.

Once you know their timeline for results, work backward to figure out when you need to sign the agreement.

Rather than asking, “Who’s the decision maker?”, ask, “If I prepare a sample proposal, whose name should I put on it?”

Junior employees aren’t always eager to introduce you to the budget authority. There are several potential reasons: They’re worried you’ll criticize their work or make them look bad, they don’t want to bother their boss, they want to stay in control of the process, or they’re not confident about your solution yet.

So if you want to learn who the true decision maker is, try an indirect question.

After your prospect has given you a name, follow up with:

• “Would you be open to a meeting with the three of us so I can get [decision maker’s] perspective on [pain point]?”
• “I’ve found [job title] often wants to be involved at [X stage]. Do you think we should bring in [decision maker] if we reach that point?”
• “Are you comfortable introducing me to [decision maker] so I can get their thoughts on X and Y?”

Since making these swaps, I’ve found it much easier to uncover key details about my prospect’s pain points, needs, and financial situation. I hope you find them helpful as well.

The call to action is a core component of marketing, sales, and any persuasion-based effort today.

There’s been a lot of content written about how to tweak CTA copy, color, size, and other elements, but sometimes, it’s easiest to learn through examples.

In this way, we can see how theoretical principles play out in the real world, and how they can create effective experiences. Therefore, this post won’t cover a ton of theory, but rather will focus on the applied uses of that theory on CTAs.

A good CTA isn’t the only element you need to succeed online, but a good CTA will certainly improve your effectiveness. Let’s return quickly to the basics before we dive into any call to action examples…

What is a Call to Action?

If you’ve been in marketing for a minute, you’re certainly familiar with what a call to action is. But let’s quickly review the definition quickly for reference.

In marketing, a call to action (also known as a “CTA”) refers to any message designed to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale. It really is as simple as it sounds: a call for someone to take action.

In the most common online iteration, a CTA is a combination of words or phrases that seek to inspire action. In conversion optimization, a typical call to action example would like something like this:

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Call to Action Examples in Conversion Optimization

A while ago, VWO put out some data that said CTAs were by far the most popular A/B test run on their platform. 30% of tests involved a call to action.

This makes sense, especially when you think about how most people learn about conversion rate optimization (namely through case studies where small CTA tweaks lead to huge lifts).

While a CTA test often isn’t the largest possible area of impact for experimentation, tons of CTAs are so bad that you can pick up some easy wins in this area.

Additionally, no web element lives in isolation. A good CTA draws heavily upon the context of the page. When you optimize other elements, your CTA may need tweaking as well.

Sure enough, here’s a call to action example where the CTA itself isn’t really wrong, but the other page elements like the background image make it super hard to read or see:

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However, CTAs aren’t exclusive to conversion optimization or website design. In any avenue of persuasion, including sales, fundraising, etc., a call to action is used to prompt action (though in sales, it’s typically called “the close“).

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When you define a call to action, it seems fairly straightforward, but many people still mess up this simple element.

Not many call to action examples are truly bad, but many could use some tweaking, like this one:

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The orange color is a nice contrast to the page, but the button is quite small and still hard to notice. “Learn more” is somewhat vague in terms of leading you to understand what the next step is.

Or this one, where the CTA buttons for the products could definitely be made more prominent and noticeable:

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Sometimes, there is no clear call to action, and instead, there is only an automatic rotating slider :(

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Unfortunately, that’s not uncommon. At the very least, if you don’t have a clear call to action, add one. Another example of a site without a clear CTA:

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There are a variety of call to action best practices. I’ll leave the theory, for the most part, to other articles, and in this piece, I’ll use examples to guide, instruct, and inspire CTA ideas.

20+ Call to Action Examples (with Reviews and Critiques)

1. Unbounce

After doing tons of button tests over the past several years, Michael Aagaard realized there are generally two questions that help you write the CTA button copy. Those two questions are:

• What is my prospect’s motivation for clicking this button?
• What is my prospect going to get when (s)he clicks this button?

If you can answer those questions crisply, concisely, and clearly, you’ll have a quality CTA button.

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Unbounce’s homepage CTA does that well. “Explore the Unbounce Platform” is unique and concise, and you know that you’ll be brought to a page to learn more about the product’s features.

2. KlientBoost

It’s tough to shake things up with CTAs. Most of them tend to offer the same things: “Download now,” “Get Access,” or “Contact Us.”

KlientBoost does a good job shaking things up, and instead of using something like “Contact Us” they say “Get My Free Proposal” – seemingly, a more compelling offer. It’s also more specific. You know exactly what the endgame here is. “Contact us” is vague, but a free proposal is concrete.

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3. Usabilla

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Not every CTA has to be a super clever or witty. In fact, for anybody outside of the inbound or digital marketing echo chamber, a CTA saying “YES!! I want to save money and get instant access!” with blinking yellow arrows is probably a bit annoying and extra.

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“Request a Demo” is boring, but if a demo is what the desired action is, it’s perfectly suitable. Clarity trumps persuasion. Just be consistent. Usabilla does that well, calling for a demo everywhere on their homepage.

4. HotJar

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The word “free” is intoxicating for marketers. We sprinkle it everywhere to hype up offers, and it usually works wonders. Humans like free stuff.

Therefore, if you have a freemium offer or a free trial, why not emphasize that? One of the biggest hurdles to conversion is uncertainty regarding payment or risk. If you can mitigate that with some soothing copy emphasizing that, “no, it won’t cost you anything,” do that.

5. TaxJar

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Sometimes, you don’t have to have the word “Free” in the CTA. Sometimes it’s obvious from the setup and page context (pro tip: it’s always about the page context).

That’s the case with TaxJar, where a solid amount of copy is devoted to explaining this is a free trial (no credit card required). “Get Started” is a solid point of action here.

6. Bulletproof

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Bulletproof has a well-optimized site. The user experience, in my opinion, is excellent. They’re clearly testing things regularly.

The homepage features a largely prototypical CTA examples of ecommerce: “Shop Now.” It’s not clever, unique, or unusually witty, but it explains pretty clearly what you’re (almost certainly) looking to do on the site.

On the same line, we’ve often seen “See Selection” outperform “Shop Now.” Even better, you can personalize for return visitors or past buyers with a “See What’s New” (as long as you have new things to show):

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To complement this, they use a prototypical product page CTA as well: “Add to Cart.” Most of the time, conversion optimization best practice is to do what your customer expect. That’s where prototypical design comes into play.

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7. Travel Wisconsin

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Travel Wisconsin splits their homepage CTAs two ways, “Our Family Vacation,” and “Trip Ideas for You.” Now, I don’t know their audience well, but I can imagine trip ideas is a more compelling offer, much more in line with the intent of the site visitor.

But in any case, the combination of the two CTAs is a bit confusing, and “Our Family Vacation” is completely vague. Everything above the fold is pretty vague, in fact.

8. CXL Institute

CXL Institute has a few different offers, ranging from one-off live courses and certification programs to the more comprehensive and high touch All Access plan. Therefore, we convey them in different ways on the homepage.

Granted, many people arrive directly on the given sales/landing page they’re interested in. In any case, we change up the CTA based on the offer from there. Many people want demos in addition to a substantial amount of people who’d like to just purchase right away, so we offer both options for the All Access plan.

These things changes, and we’re iterating, so it may be different in the future, but our current CTAs reflect the different intents of our audience and the different natures of our offers.

9. BounceX

A CTA doesn’t have to be words in a rectangular box with a contrasting color. In its essence, a CTA just calls for action (the nomenclature here is quite literal). So, you can get creative with the execution.

BounceX does a great job at making you click play and watch their promo video:

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10. Bounce X (part 2)

BounceX has a treasure trove of behavioral marketing content in their “think tank.”

Each piece of content has its own well-designed landing page. Each call to action example could be a case study in how to do things right. The size, color and contrast, affordance – everything about the design is great. In addition, they do copywriting well.

They answer the question, “I want to ____” and use that as their CTA copy.

11. BounceX (part 3)

Same story in this example. This call to action example is for a webinar, so the copy changes to “Watch it Now,” keeping pace with the context of the offer.

12. Intercom

Intercom maintains consistency with both CTAs above the fold on their homepage Since they offer a free trial, it’s a simple “Get Started,” with an email opt-in as well.

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13. Zoom

Zoom’s homepage follows a similar structure, with a contrasting and noticeable CTA offering visitors the chance to sign up. Since it’s also a trial (and free), they just go for it right away.

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14. CXL

This is the general template we use for our lead generation landing pages. This one, in particular, is for a webinar and goes for clarity: “Attend Webinar.” Again, we try to follow the formula of answering, “I Want To ____,” and that works in this scenario.

15. Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss’s call to action is unique both in placement and in terms of the offer. His big offer and focus now is the podcast, so he prominently asks users to “Click to Listen.”

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16. Paleo Leap

I’m a huge fan of Paleo Leap, but I’m not a big fan of their CTAs. There are dozens of them on the homepage (where does one start?), so it’s difficult to understand the most important desired action. In addition, the design could use work – the CTAs are hardly noticeable at a glance and blend right into the white background.

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17. Looker

Looker has two CTAs on their homepage, which goes against common CRO best practices.

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Sure, having only one action per page reduces distraction and makes things more clear for the visitor. But if you’re selling enterprise software, why not cater to how people want to buy? You may wish they’d all demo, or they’d all sign up for a trial, but people exhibit different buying habits – and when the value of a sale is so high, why rule it out because of ‘best practices’?

So, you can choose either a live demo or a recorded version, which I think is great. However, their recorded demo page could use some work. No one wants to “submit,” especially when the offer appears to be a free trial.

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18. Tableau

I’m not a huge fan of Tableau’s CTA. Well, there are actually two above the fold, and the one that pops out is the “Try Now” on the upper right-hand side of the screen, which may be intentional.

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But the one below the headline that says “See in Action” is both hard to see/find and somewhat vague. Does “see in action” mean I get a pre-recorded demo like the Looker call to action example? Does it mean I’m scheduling a live demo? Does it mean I get an interactive walk through?

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Turns out it’s the first one, a triggered promo video, but you would have a hard time guessing based on the CTA copy.

19. Verve Coffee

This one is pretty bad.

Starting from the page-context level, the headline and image aren’t super enlightening. I’m not sure what an “adventure pack is. Then the CTA is “Join the Adventure,” but since I’m on a website for a coffee brand, I was under the impression I was shopping for coffee. Very confusing.

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20. Nomadic Matt

Strong CTA copy (“Get Travel Tips,” which follows the “I Want To ___” formula). Easy and intuitive form. Wonderful page context. Contrasting colors and prominently displayed above the fold. Well done!

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Before You Test: Some Caveats

This guide is meant to inspire, not to instruct. Every website is contextually, and while I can judge these call to action examples against the theory of design and copywriting, I don’t know how they’re actually performing.

So, here comes the common conversion optimization advice: test it yourself.

…Or don’t. Maybe it’s not the highest value area for optimization. Maybe you have bigger biggest challenges. Qubit put out an awesome meta-analysis of 6700+ ecommerce experiments, and they found that CTA tests, on average, don’t move the needle often (and when they do, it’s not by a lot):

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Maybe you’ve already tested a ton of CTAs and have a pretty good level of knowledge as to what works. CTA tests scale well, meaning once you’ve done enough experimentation you can usually replicate the winners across similar offers. We use the same CTA across any similar landing pages with similar offers.

And if you’re just starting to optimize your website, it may be more beneficial to start with some higher impact areas. Use conversion research to discover real problems on your site, don’t just test CTAs because they’re easy to set up in a visual editor.

Conclusion

The call to action is an important element of website design, conversion optimization, or any form of marketing or persuasion. Invest some time and effort into crafting good CTA copy, making sure the design is right, and designing with the page context in mind.

This post outlined a huge list of call to action examples. Probably too many – some good, some bad, some awful or non-existent. The hope isn’t that you’ll copy any of them outright, but rather they’ll act as inspiration or fuel for thought on how you design your own.

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I’ve asked many VPs of Sales the same question. Which is the best book on the fundamentals of selling? Almost unequivocally, they respond, “Miller-Heiman.” The New Strategic Selling is an updated version of the original Strategic Selling, which was published in 1988, and describes the key activities of successful sales people. I resonated with two concepts in the book: the 4 Seller Response Modes and the authors’ recommendations on how to prioritize a salesperson’s time.

The 4 Seller Modes classify the prospect’s state of mind. This is important because, “Anytime you’re asking someone to buy something, you’re asking them to make a change.” Determining the prospect’s mindset helps a salesperson determine if the prospect is ready to make a change, or not; and how to respond. To convert a prospect to a buyer, a salesperson must establish the discrepancy between the prospect’s current state and their ideal state; and establish that the salesperson’s product will resolve it.

Growth mode prospects recognize the gap between where they find themselves and their ideal. They are driven by the desire to do more and ready to buy. Troubled buyers fear the current situation and search for a solution to their perceived or real problems. Even-keeled prospects don’t perceive a problem. They are very difficult to sell to. The same is true of Overconfident prospects who don’t believe or see an issue in their state of affairs. No discrepancy, no sale. These 4 Seller Modes provide a succinct categorization of prospects.

Moving onto sales time prioritization, Miller and Heiman recommend prioritizing efforts in an unusual pattern.

1. Closing work on the highest quality leads
2. Prospect new leads
3. Qualify existing leads
4. Move the existing leads through the funnel

To rank prospecting as the second most important activity seemed counterintuitive to me. I would have thought moving backwards up through the funnel would have been the optimal. But the authors submit that building the top of the funnel is more important than moving other leads through the funnel. This order maximizes consistency of leads in the funnel and leads to more predictable pipeline and income for the sales person. I’m curious how modern account executives manage their time. If you have a point of view, please send me a comment using the chat box at tomtunguz.com.

Overall, Strategic Selling is a very mechanized approach to selling effectively. I haven’t touched on other frameworks introduced in the book including the four buying influences, territory management or other key sales books. The book is a comprehensive guide to the processes and frameworks for maximizing sales success.

Change is hard.

Human beings inherently reject change, as the fear of the unknown is real – and a powerful motivator to maintain “the way things are.”

But, as Peter Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Account Based Marketing is a new way of approaching large opportunities. In this current groundswell of ABM, learning how to manage change is a critical part of implementing it successfully. The companies who recognize the need for active change management to guide their ABM programs are often the ones who see the quickest success.

Account Based Marketing in your organization, you’re bound to face some resistance and challenges as a result of changing such fundamental parts of sales and marketing – mindset, behavior, communication, and measurement.

Nevertheless, you should persist with some tenets of good change management. If these changes are not constantly attended to, people will revert back to their old ways of working.

The ABM Change Management Checklist:

• Sell the need for change – to the ABM team and the wider sales and marketing organizations.
• Get the input of every team – before rolling out your strategy, listen to the people who will be executing and enabling it.
• Communicate often – regularly update key executives and the entire sales and marketing team to explain how it’s going and why; remind them of the goals each time.
• Use your metrics – ABM success is never instant. Use your coverage and engagement metrics to show progress.
• Spot resistance – don’t ignore it; listen hard and get people on board.
• Meet regularly – to prevent slipping back to old ways of working.
• Celebrate success – when it comes, make sure people know about it.

ABM puts an onus on marketers to understand more – not just about the world that sales lives in, but to do a better job of understanding the world that customers live in.”
– Megan Heuer SiriusDecisions

Don’t underestimate the changing role of marketing.

One of the biggest changes happens on the marketing side, where a department used to being measured by number of leads generated is now measured by quality of engagement with targeted accounts. Don’t underestimate this change. And don’t expect it to happen simply because you announced the new goals and metrics.

Field marketers

Field marketers are often called upon to help support ABM accounts in their regions. They’re the feet on the street and know about the local account dynamics. Make sure they’re included in the ABM strategy sessions so they’re on board when you need them. You’ll also need them to understand that the ABM accounts can’t be included in their general marketing campaigns.

An ABM Helpdesk

As ABM grows, a helpdesk to serve the requests from the field sales and marketing teams may be needed. Fast access to customer references, white papers on an industry issue or subject matter experts will start to roll in — often with very little warning and with an “I-need-it-yesterday!” urgency.

“Management often has a difficult time justifying a full-time marketer focused on 3-5 ABM accounts that might help generate 20 new contacts and 5 opportunities when a junior marketer may create 500 new contacts and 100 opportunities. Of course, the value between those scenarios is vast, but the change in mindset is significant.”
– Kathy Macchi, Inverta

ABM also changes the roles of Sales and technology.

The biggest change that ABM demands of the sales team is to embrace the new relationship with their marketing teammates. In traditional demand generation, marketing throws leads over the fence for sales to chase. In ABM, there is no fence. The collaboration is close, constant and totally focused on defined, account-specific objectives.

The key here is to start with account reps who are open to this kind of relationship.

Once you’ve got that, the ongoing progress of each account reinforces the effectiveness of the ABM approach. In well-run ABM programs, the only challenge is that more reps will want to be included than the program can accommodate!

“Use ABM either as an opportunity to leverage current tools and practices effectively in individual accounts or as a spearhead for investing in and experimenting with some of these tools.”
– ITSMA, Marketing Technology for ABM

ABM technology

You can run a successful ABM pilot with very little additional ABM technology. But technology can be hugely useful when you want to scale your program beyond a few accounts.

Today, few marketing tools or platforms have been designed from the ground up to have an account-based view of the world. As a recent ITSMA report states, “It requires creative thinking to adapt tools that were not necessarily designed to support an account-based view of the world.”

The integration challenge

Your ABM technology stack shouldn’t be a silo. Instead, you’ll need to integrate it with your core marketing platforms – chiefly your CRM and Marketing Automation tool – and possibly with systems such as digital advertising, social listening and business intelligence. Some of these integrations will be fairly straightforward, using the existing APIs of the software involved. Others may need some custom integrations and the involvement of systems integrators or your IT team.

“Regardless of which technology tools you implement and apply to ABM, make sure that they are well integrated. Otherwise, their benefits will be substantially diminished.”
– ITSMA, Marketing Technology for ABM

ABM Critical Success Factors

As with any change in any company, implementing ABM is a challenge.

But if you take the time to get the critical pieces in place – and actively manage the change – success will follow.

• Strong and visible executive sponsorship
• Tight alignment between sales and marketing
• 360-degree agreement on goals for the ABM program
• Robust account selection process
• Careful ABM team selection
• Clear and agreed to metrics with consistent reporting
• Clarity of roles and responsibilities
• A regular collaboration cadence
• Patience!

How do you manage the change that comes with shifting to an account-centric strategy?

Learn how to succeed at aligning sales and marketing. Erik Host-Steen, Founder of SMP Alignment, shares his best practices for aligning your sales and marketing teams. From effective handoffs to qualified leads and using technology to smooth out the process. Erik talks about how to get your sales and marketing departments to work together.

Selling software shouldn’t really be much of a trouble, especially if you happen to be an experienced vendor who knows his market all too well. Still, there is a need for tech companies to up their marketing game, and getting decision-makers to consider purchasing your product involves more than just reading up on Marketing “How-To’s.”

Be it as it may, lead generation and appointment setting remain the most crucial aspects in selling software and IT products. On the B2B side, more has to be done for companies to maximize their revenues, lessen costs and losses, and remain competitive in the battlefield.

With software startups sprouting here and there like mushrooms, it can be difficult even for veteran brands to remain consistent in selling their software. Apparently, there is still a lot for them to understand when it comes to attract high quality IT and software leads, and meet sales targets in the long run.

For our part, we offer you some of the best tips to consider to stay ahead, starting with:

#1. Informational content.

You guessed it right. We are crazy for content, and so are your prospects. And if you want to increase your brand’s appeal, you might want to start creating effective content that touches on your prospect’s expectations.

There is a whole plethora of things you can do to put your products front and center. In your case, you might want to add infographics and other nifty visual stuff to your creative arsenal.

#2. Tap influencers.

In your industry, there are a lot of personalities who you call influencers. Basically, they are the who’s who in the software industry. Their clout speaks a lot about their influence, and to invite them post something on your blog will eventually win over some potential customers to your side.

#3. Offer discounts and coupons.

Okay, so we are delving into traditional territory right now. But you will realize how important it is really for companies to offer discounts on products on sale. If it works in the past, it may as well work in the present. So, whenever someone signs up for your newsletter, give them product codes and limited one-time offers. These will basically lure decision-makers towards a purchase, satisfaction guaranteed!

In connection with this, we created our Marketing eBooks, not solely to lure prospects but also help and share them with their marketing campaigns. It’s one way of establishing your name in the industry, give more than you take. This even applies in growing your email list.

#4. SEO, SEO, SEO!

Search Engine Optimization remains as your best bet to get software sales through the roof. After all, most prospects consider search engines as their prime source for knowing about the right software solutions for them. It is only a matter of using content that uses the right amount of keywords to give your brand a good boost in terms of sales.

Did we miss out on other important tips for selling software products? Share them in the comments below.

This post originally appeared at The Savvy Marketers.