Design Your Pricing

Bringing a new offer to market is one of the most difficult things a business does. There are a lot of moving parts and it is difficult to keep all of them aligned. Pricing is something that often gets left to the end of the process.

"Oh yes, we need a price, what are other people charging?"

"Oh, you actually want to buy this! How much do we charge? Uhh, how much would you pay?"

"Ok, now we need a pricing page, let's be nice and direct and just tell them what it will cost."

Or the opposite approach is sometimes ...

"Price? Have no idea. Let's not publish anything, just have them call us and we can talk it through."

Each of these are recipes for failure, but we see them happen all too often. They are the result of a failure to purposefully design pricing.

Design pricing! Is pricing designed?

Well, in some ways. The best practices developed in the design thinking and service design communities can and should be applied to pricing. Here is how we do this at Ibbaka.

1. Understand the emotional and economic value of the new offer (which requires a lot of empathy)
2. Compare this to the next best competitive alternatives
3. Build a market segmentation based on value drivers and buying processes (a good segment is a group of potential customers that get value in the same way, that buy in the same way, and that can be reached through the same channels - ideally the buyers in the segment talk to each other as well)
4. Choose and sequence target segments (what are the best segments to go after in which order)
5. Figure out the value metrics (the units of use associated with value), this is an iterative process that requires a lot of interactions with potential buyers and users
6. Design the value model and usage model and connect them, try to get them designed into the offer's data model
7. Brainstorm and test different pricing metrics (the units of use that the buyer will be charged for, this is a major area of innovation)
8. Choose the pricing metrics that will resonate with the target segments
9. Design a pricing architecture with clearly defined roles for each tier; use value metrics not chosen as pricing metrics as fences to guide buyers to the appropriate tier (you can also use functionality as fences so that different tiers get different functionality)
10. Revise the data model so that the data needed for the pricing model can also be captured (now we have three connected models - value model, usage model, pricing model)
11. Set pricing levels
12. Monitor and see how buyers are responding (analyse the sales funnel), how competitors are reacting, how pricing and usage are correlated and to ensure that users are getting the intended value (and we hope some unexpected value)

Design Thinking: Apply design thinking to your pricing process. Design Thinking is a term popularized by Tim Brown at IDEO and Roger Martin (then at the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto). The d.school at Stanford University offers an excellent program and set of resources. Design thinking begins with a deep emotional understanding of the buyer and user needs. Multiple designs are generated and explored, tested with users and refined. Over multiple iterations the design is clarified and focussed.

Service Design: Use service design as part of the pricing design process. Service design is an approach to design thinking used to develop services (B2B SaaS and Internet of Things solutions are best thought of as services). For pricing work, consider each touch point where the buyer builds awareness, understanding and consideration of value and make sure that value comes before price in the revenue generation process. Design communication so that price is always put in the context of value.

Don't set prices. Design pricing.

The money that your prospective client takes out of your pricing is money they are taking out of the outcomes and results they are trying to produce.

Your prospective client doesn’t realize this is what they are doing. They don’t understand that without allowing you to invest that money on their behalf through your solution, that money is not being spent in at all. They don’t recognize that while they may still have the cash, that cash would be put to better use generating the outcomes they need, and resolving the challenges that have caused them to consider changing in the first place.

They believe, and they may not be wrong here, that you have padded your price, expecting to be asked for a discount. They believe, and they’re not wrong here either, that it is their responsibility to obtain the best deal they can for their company. So, they have to ask you for the discount.

For your part, you have to explain that the money being taken out of the solution is literally being taken out of the solution. The discount that they are asking for results in less money being spent on the results they told you they need throughout the discovery process, and throughout the work you did collaborating to design the solution.

Your prospective client can hold onto their cash and accept a lesser result, or invest the cash and produce a greater result. Look, if it makes better sense to invest less and change the solution to something that fits that investment, then recommend that and help them make that investment. But if they insist that the outcomes they need are important enough that they should change and do something different, then help them invest the right amount of money to do so, even if it’s more than they anticipated.

What you don’t want to do is take money out of the solution only to deliver less than you promised, or less than the client actually needs.

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Photo credit: ashokboghani Water drain via photopin (license).

The post Taking Money out of the Solution appeared first on The Sales Blog.

How to Do a Good Sales Presentation that Closes More Deals

Let’s face it, we all need to know how to do a good sales presentation.

Even if we’ve been “in the game” for a long time, selling the same products—our presentations can get stale after awhile.

Like loaf-of-bread-left-on-the-counter-2-weeks kind of stale…blue science project mold included…

Sure, you may be so comfortable with your go-to presentation that you don’t feel much incentive to change it, but that’s a sign in itself that it’s time for a revamp. The moment you get too comfortable with anything in the sales world, something is amiss, right?

Nothing induces a snooze fest faster than stale, old and irrelevant presentations.

Learning how to do a good sales presentation is the key to your success in sales.

Your goal is to be persuasive, unique and keep your clients awake and interested.

That’s the crux of how sales presentations work, right? Sounds simple, but it’s not always so cut and dry.

Depending on your personality, the presentation process either leaves you excited or biting your nails in anticipation. No matter your personal feelings toward them, presentations are at the heart of what you do and they aren’t leaving the picture any time soon.

How to Do a Good Sales Presentation (Five Tips)

Having a presentation that’s unique and that you feel proud of will give you that extra boost of confidence you need to close the deal. Confidence is contagious; if you have it, your potential clients will feel it and become more confident in your company and brand.

If you are feeling a bit stuck for ideas, here are 5 tips to help you knock your next sales presentation out of the park.

1. Speak to the Challenges of Your Clients

This is the most basic tip we will cover today, but it’s extremely important and often overlooked.

Remember why you are there—there is a problem or challenge that your company can help solve. Niching down and understanding a target industry or prospect really helps here.

The moment you lose sight of this important detail, you have killed your own presentation.

No one wants to hear about what you offer when it doesn’t relate to them. Focus on the particular parts of their business that you will make easier/more effective etc. with your products and services, not just about your company.

Many salespeople fumble at this stage by having a cookie cutter presentation that lacks focus on the exact needs of the company they are presenting to. It’s boring and irrelevant.

2. Master Your Body Language

There are many factors you can’t control during your presentation…the obnoxiously contagious-sounding cough of the guy closest to you, the heavy breathing of the executive to your right…fortunately one of the most effective factors is something that you can control—body language.

Our body language says more than our vocal chords each and every day.

Jennifer Burnham over at Salesforce has several great tips for mastering your body language during presentations.

Her Six Tips

1. Lean Forward – It’s not hard to gauge interest in a conversation. Think about a great date or a great conversation with a friend you’ve had recently. You were engaged in an animated conversation and probably nodded and leaned forward excitedly, right? It comes naturally when you are with those you are comfortable with, but you will likely have to be a bit more conscious of it during your presentations. If you’re slumped or not looking engaged, your audience will notice it.
2. Keep Your Arms Open – Did you know that crossing your arms not only makes you look unapproachable, but it also makes you retain less information? In fact, you retain 38% less information with your legs and arms crossed!
3. Never Point – Pointing is often viewed as aggressive and rude. If you need to gesture toward something, use a full sweep of the arm or basically anything softer than the finger point.
4. Smile Naturally – You aren’t a robot, the people watching your presentation want to see an actual person with actual emotions. There is, of course, a difference between a forced smile and a natural one, but try your best to smile and act naturally throughout your presentation.
5. Utilize Eye Contact – One of the easiest ways to keep any audience listening to you and engaging with you is by maintaining eye contact. It gives the appearance that you are speaking directly to them, this naturally awakens curiosity and attention span.
6. Notice What Your Feet are Doing – This lesser-known body language secret could be giving you away; your feet may be showing your true feelings. Studies have found that our feet naturally point to those we prefer and away from those we don’t. When you consider the undeniable feeling we get to run away when we aren’t feeling connected, it makes sense. By comparison, if we are engaged in a conversation, we lean toward the person, and naturally face them. Additionally, feet placed close together is a sign of timidness while wide stance feet show more confidence.

3. Don’t Just Spit Out a Memorized Script

If your presentation is too well rehearsed, it will actually backfire. Many salespeople swear by memorizing each and every aspect of their presentation, but honestly if you sound like you are reading a memorized script, people will tune you out.

If you were like most kids growing up in America, you probably had to memorize the Preamble for the Declaration of Independence. That awful type of memorization is mind-numbing.

Make your presentations more fluid and open to going with the flow.

If you’re simply spouting out a memorized speech, you’re bored and likely boring to listen to.

4. Focus on the 80/20 Rule

This tip follows closely on the heels of addressing the company’s challenges that you will fix rather than focusing on what your company does. Essentially spend 80% of the time speaking to them about how you will solve a problem they are experiencing.

Picture it like a first date. Is there anything that’s more of a turnoff than listening to your date ramble on and on about their accomplishments? Their background and the 1000 things they’ve done since graduation?

Don’t be that bad first date.

You are essentially courting your clients, so be that gracious date that asks questions and focuses on the person on the other side of the table.

Twenty percent you, 80% them. When in doubt, just remember you are there to solve a problem.

5. Utilize Case Studies

Remember those seemingly endless days, trapped in school? Listening to your teacher drone on and on…?

Chances are, you probably perked up a bit when there was at least some visual aspect or how-this-relates-to-you example. If your sales presentation consists of you talking and talking…and talking, you will lose the client’s interest.

Case studies are a worthwhile tool not only for creating visual stimulation. They’re also good for showing real examples of how what you offer is utilized and why it was a success.

They also serve as a way to cut through the confusion. No longer is it a list of 20 things you can do for them, but an actual outlined example of what you have done for others and why it worked.

It’s another form of social selling really. We honor customer reviews above the words of a company, and when we utilize case studies, we are providing social proof that we are as good as our word.

A great post by Steve Woodruff sums up the process of using case studies in sales presentations.

His 5 Main Points:

1. Make sure your story is tailored to your audience. What good is your case study if it’s not relevant? No good at all, and worse yet it can only contribute to the customer’s confusion. Especially if it isn’t focused on a relevant topic.
2. Focus on the client’s main need. There’re likely many problems you can help solve. But your goal is to focus in on just one. Cut through the clutter and use a case study that speaks exactly to the problem at hand.
3. Use the case study to show specifically how you can ease their “pain points”. Every company has “pain points,” or specific areas of difficulty. Reinforce how you will make life easy with your customer success stories.
4. Focus on results. The journey is great and all but when it comes to winning clients, it’s all about the results. Make sure you focus on these.
5. Include a customer testimonial or quote. Social selling is where it’s at, when possible utilize the voice of your clients.

Allow yourself plenty of time before your next sales presentation to utilize these changes. Once you do, you’ll likely feel much more confident in your presentation style.

And your client retention rates will reflect this.

You can check out a previous post we did if you’re looking for more sales presentation ideas.

Ready to Crush Your Next Sales Presentation?

Notice there is nothing on our list about knowing the product, or negotiating pricing, things like that.

Why?

Because what your product does and how much it costs are trivial in comparison to the results the product achieves and how they feel about you and the brand. It may sound diabolical, but people (often times) don’t buy features or value.

At least not nearly as much as results and emotion.

Have you learned how to do a good sales presentation? What’s your go-to method when it comes to acing a sales presentation?

You praise people in public, and you reprimand them in private. By reprimanding them in private, you prevent them from being embarrassed, from having to defend themselves, and you demonstrate to those in your charge that they are going to be treated fairly. This is a good practice, except when it isn’t.

You may have someone on your team who is doing well, and who their peers look to as a model, for advice or for help understanding the way things work. Occasionally, one of these high performers will also be negative and cynical. Worse still, they will also be vocal.

Even though they are succeeding, they will speak up in meetings about how your products are not right for the market. They will explain out loud why your competitor’s products are better, and they’ll point to lost deals as proof. The people in your charge will hear this and take note, thinking to themselves, “If this top performer loses because our products aren’t right, how can I win?”

This top performer will also complain about your pricing model, even when that pricing model has afforded them the luxury of a compensation structure that provides them with an exceptional living. Even though this person is doing well they’ll point out all of the deals that they lost to your irrational competitor as proof that the price is too high, stating out loud that a concession on price was all that would have been necessary to win. The rest of the sales force will hear these words and believe that their deals going to suffer the same fate.

And here is the outcome of this negative high performer complaining out loud: The rest of the sales force will believe it is is true, looking to this person for their beliefs about what is necessary to succeed. In this negative person’s words, they will find the rationale for their failure to perform. It won’t be their skills, it will be the product. It won’t be an inability to convey the value of your offering, or the fact that they aren’t prospecting enough to have good prospects, it will be the pricing that they blame for not succeeding. It won’t be mistakes that they made during the sales process that causes losses when the irrational competitor is there to serve as their scape goat.

This is why you must deal with this negativity in public. Your team needs to see you stand up to the high performer, pointing to the absurdity of someone who is doing well complaining that sales isn’t easier, and disabusing them of their excuses. Doing this in private deprives them of seeing what you believe strongly enough to fight over.

Your team needs to be infected with your beliefs, not the beliefs of someone who would provide them with excuses. You are the spiritual leader of your sales force, and that means building the right mindset in your team.

The post Why You Must Challenge Negative Beliefs in Public appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In 2014, Uber's CEO Travis Kalanick was reveling in his company's rapid rise.

Uber had emerged as a challenger to — and potential destroyer of — the taxi industry with its network of cars available at the push of a button. But Kalanick was already looking well beyond the ride-hailing business.

"If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes," he told Vanity Fair.

By that time, Kalanick had already started selling investors and potential employees on his dream of Uber becoming more than an app-powered taxi company, but a logistics business that could one day rival the likes of FedEx, Amazon, JB Hunt, and Ryder. Uber planned to apply its special sauce to every industry that moved things around, whether it was courier services or catering orders, and upend those markets like it did the livery service.

The first big test of whether the company could deliver on Kalanick's promise came in the form of a service it called UberRush. Designed to deliver goods to customers within minutes of being ordered, Rush relied on similar systems as Uber's ride hailing service and many of the same drivers. To get Rush off the ground, Uber teamed up with national retail chains, popular providers of online checkout services for local business, and mom-and-pop stores.

But now, nearly a year-and-a-half since its launch, UberRush has shriveled as a business opportunity — and so has Uber's grand ambition to become a logistics behemoth.

Uber hasn't expanded Rush past its original three launch cities. Instead it's pushed the service aside in favor of ventures like UberEats and Uber Freight, according to the more than a dozen former partners and employees Business Insider spoke to, many of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of agreements signed with the company. Although Eats and Freight are part of Uber's logistics vision, they don't hold the same promise as UberRush did to transform the industry.

They were saying this is going to be huge.

The idea of Uber becoming a logistics magnate played an important role in the company's valuation swelling to $69 billion and was an key component of Kalanick's own vision for the company. But those who worked on Rush say it's failed to live up to its promise of becoming the big business Uber needs.

"They were saying this is going to be huge. You can get anything delivered," a former employee said.

This is the story of how that hasn't come true.

Uber, but for everything

Uber's attempt to turn itself into a player in the logistics industry began in April 2014 with a test of a new system for requesting bike couriers on-demand in New York City. The company teased the service by tweeting a photo of a bike courier on the streets of New York.

That was the beginning of UberRush. The company was planning to build out a dispatch network for delivering goods that was similar to the one it built out for its taxi service.

In building Rush, Uber turned to the tried-and-true internet success formula of using existing resources to enter an entirely new market. Just as Amazon has used the backend servers and data centers that power its retail operations to build a separate cloud business, Uber planned to use its app, its dispatching system and, eventually, its network of drivers to disrupt the logistics market.

In the early days of UberRush in New York, anyone in the city could request a bike courier just like they would request a ride — with a push of button in Uber's app. During the the New York City pilot, a Business Insider reporter had an UberRush driver retrieve a raincoat she'd forgotten at a meeting. It was dropped off within 20 minutes for $11.

But Uber soon learned that most people don't need bike messengers or a courier service in their everyday lives, forgotten raincoats or misplaced keys aside.

Instead the company realized that the much more promising business opportunity for UberRush was to offer it as a service for local retailers. The Rush team spent the next year working on pitching its vision for the future of delivery services to businesses ranging from clothing shops to chocolatiers to Mexican restaurants. It also worked to team up with the companies that helped those local businesses sell online.

If a flower shop needed a bouquet delivered down the street, it could summon an UberRush courier to deliver the flowers on its behalf instead of having to hire its own delivery workers. If a pizza shop that did have its own delivery drivers found that it didn't have enough at a particular time, it could get a Rush driver to stop by, pick up a pie and ferry it to a customer.

Just as Uber's taxi service transformed the way people moved around cities, the company hoped Rush would change how everything moved around cities.

Uber officially launched Rush in October 2015 in three cities — New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Rush's debut marked the first time Uber had committed to a business outside of its main ride-hailing arm that was supposed to be meaningful to its bottom line.

"It's no longer an experiment ... It's a business for us," Jason Droege, the head of Uber Everything, said at its launch. "When it's a business, you're worried about the profit and loss."

Uber declined to make Droege or other top executives available for an interview.

The problem with t-shirts on-demand

Initially, UberRush looked like it might live up to its promise.

By the time it launched, it had already signed on Shopify, Clover, ChowNow, and Delivery.com — companies that provide online checkout services for local retailers and restaurants. Early in 2016 Rush's team signed high-profile deals with luxury brands Nordstrom's and Cole Haan. Grocery store Harris Teeter started using UberRush for deliveries at a few locations in Virginia. Immediately following the end of that year's Super Bowl, Dick's Sporting Goods used Rush couriers in New York and Chicago to deliver commemorative t-shirts.

Behind the scenes though, Uber struggled to find a way to make its delivery network work for a wide range of businesses and to design it so they'd use it for regularly, instead of just for one-off promotions.

The Rush group cycled through 30 different experiments, testing out delivering products for businesses ranging from clothing shops to florists to see which might be good fits for its service, one former exec said. But the company was finding that the service it offered — a delivery network consisting of bike messengers and people with personal vehicles — wasn't a good match for the delivery needs many businesses had.

"If you want to move stuff in a city, you're basically talking about flowers and dry cleaning," the former employee said. Anything larger than that — like food catering orders or furniture — "isn't really possible with a Toyota Prius," the former employee added.

At one point, the Rush team toyed with the idea of building a standalone retail app, like it would eventually do for food with UberEats, according to multiple people familiar with the app idea. The app would have shown and allowed consumers to place orders from stores that used Rush and could deliver later that day. UberRush's sales team pitched retailers on the app for a few months to get them to sign up for Rush, but later abandoned the idea.

An Uber spokesperson said the company's engineers never worked on even a prototype for the app.

The rise of Eats

While striking out generally, Rush did get a hit in one particular area: delivering food. In Chicago, the majority of businesses using Rush were restaurants, one former employee said.

Many restaurants signed up to use Rush either as their primary delivery service or as a back-up when they needed it. Some used Rush instead of hiring their own teams of delivery drivers. Others, though, signed up for Rush to be able to use Uber's on-demand drivers in a pinch, such as when one of their own drivers called in sick.

But Rush focused only on the last step in delivering food. The more Uber got involved in the business, the more it wanted to control the whole process — and the money and branding that came with it. So Uber started focusing more closely on the food delivery.

As part of its broader efforts to build a logistics business, Uber had already started to experiment with different kinds of food delivery as early as 2014. As part of those experiments, it launched a new test with a separate service called UberEats in Toronto in December 2015.

In the beginning, Eats only offered a selection of a few meals from local restaurants for lunch. The initial plan was to have drivers ride around with heating bags to keep the food fresh so they could dole out a burrito or a sandwich in only a few minutes after a customer placed an order.

Eventually, the company began offering full menus from restaurants. Inside Uber, the sales team would open up competitors' apps and go through their lists of restaurants and start calling those businesses around the clock to try to convince them to sign up with Eats. Other Uber employees reached out to the couriers who worked for rivals like Caviar, to try to lure them over to Eats and Rush.

Unlike Rush's abandoned retail app, Uber built a standalone app for its Eats service. It marked the first time Uber had ever launched a separate app for one of its products.

Uber officially launched Eats in Los Angeles early in 2016, with a national rollout already planned. By the end of 2016, Eats was available in its 56 cities. By contrast, Rush was still relegated to its first three.

Rush falters

The rise of Eats would slowly begin to encroach on Rush's potential and become the breakout star of Uber's logistics efforts. But you couldn't tell right away.

The Rush team continued to add name-brand partners, including Walmart which used Rush in a grocery delivery test. In June, Uber tried to juice up Rush by releasing an API, or software code, that would allow other businesses to easily sign up for the delivery service and offer it through their websites without having to go through a laborious sales process. In San Francisco, a local pizza business used this process to tap Rush as needed to deliver orders rather than hiring more delivery drivers of its own.

I'm disappointed in how untrue it all is.

But Rush's promise of turning Uber into a logistics giant was starting to falter. When Jose Cordero started delivering for Rush in New York early in 2016, it was a crazily lucrative gig, thanks to all the incentives Uber was offering. Even after the company stopped those initial promotions, the work was still steady, and the pay was good.

But by the end of the summer, the deliveries Rush was sending his way started to slip "substantially," Cordero told Business Insider. It became harder and harder to work with Rush. Cordero eventually quit the service to be a courier for PostMates, one of Rush's rivals.

"I'm disappointed in how untrue it all is," Cordero said, referring to Rush.

Internally, the Rush team was trying to grow the service into a big business with flashy deals, but struggled with building a product whose customers were businesses rather than consumers.

Part of the problem it faced was having to change both business and consumer behavior. Businesses had to build same-day delivery into their systems and find a way to market the service to customers. And getting customers excited about paying a little extra to have something delivered on-demand wasn't an easy sell for most products. While many people order food to be delivered — in some cases, multiple times a day — there are just few cases when most people need to have a t-shirt or most other things delivered right away.

It's not never, but it's not enough to build a great business

"It's not never, but it's not enough to build a great business," one former exec said. And to support its valuation, Uber needed to build big businesses.

Another problem Rush was facing was with pricing. Customers flocked to Uber's ride-hailing business in large part because it was generally cheaper than taking a cab. But Rush, by contrast, was typically more expensive than the competition.

The prices at local stores that were Rush's partners are usually higher than what consumers would pay at Amazon or other online retailers. And once you factored in Rush's delivery charges, products were often much more expensive, even compared to Amazon's next-day delivery service, said another former Uber executive.

And that's not to mention that if consumers need something right away — and don't mind paying a little extra — they generally just go to the nearest store.

"It's hard to get the level of success of the ride-sharing business in this world," this former exec said. "In ride sharing, I'm just replacing a cab. Here you're not going to get that immediate replacement of behavior. I can still just go down to the bodega."

Ruthless prioritization

Rush's partners started growing frustrated. Uber kept telling them it would expand Rush into additional cities, one business leader said. But aside from a few limited trials for particular clients, it never did.

The feeling started to sink in among some of the businesses using it that Uber was going to "kill off" Rush.

"They were basically trying to beat out local courier services," said another former employee. "But it kind of started being an afterthought."

Uber redirected some of its Rush sales team from working to bring in new business to trying to keep existing clients happy.

When they realized Uber wasn't going to continue to develop or expand Rush, members of the Rush team were upset and disillusioned, several of the former employees said. Some of Rush's earliest internal leaders started leaving, especially as it became clear that Uber was starting to focus its logistics ambitions on other areas, most notably Eats and Uber Freight.

As Uber geared up in the fall of 2016 to launch the Freight business, which pairs truck drivers with loads that need to be hauled, Rush became a quiet footnote not even worthy of a company blog post.

The team had struck a nationwide deal with CVS that was supposed to be announced in November, but Rush's partnership with CVS got downgraded from a high-profile splashy launch to a quiet experiment. This spring, Uber emailed its restaurant partners who were using Rush and asked them to switch to Eats. It warned them it was killing off the API it had released just a year before.

Meanwhile, the Eats team started curtailing Rush's dealings with restaurants. It even blocked Rush from signing on Yelp's Eat24 delivery service as a customer, according to The Information.

Uber had a big incentive to promote Eats over Rush for food delivery — the former could contribute much more to the company's overall sales than the latter.

With Rush, Uber could only count its delivery fees as revenue, because consumers were typically placing orders through another company's website or app, one person familiar with the two services said. But with Eats, all orders go through Uber's app, so it can count the order cost as well as the delivery charges as revenue, this person said.

If a customer ordered $25 worth of food and agreed to a $5 delivery charge, Uber could only count that $5 fee as revenue if the order were delivered by Rush. But if the customer placed the same order through Eats, Uber could count the whole $30 as revenue. And with Eats, Uber was able to take bring a greater portion of that $30 order down to its bottom line.

Another problem Rush faced is that Uber doesn't have the time to focus on smaller businesses or corporations that don't move at its lightning-fast speed. So it's devoted its attention to building out Eats, which is already in 27 countries and 100 cities. That's a pace that Rush just hasn't been able to match.

"I think at this point, it's not that it's critical to the company's future, per se," said one long-time Rush employee about the delivery service. "Whether it's important for the ride sharing business, I don't think so. It's a story for recruiting, a story for Wall Street."

The problem for Uber overall is that the difficulties it's had with Rush raise questions about how easily the company can use its existing business model to upend other markets — a key piece of the story Uber sold to the investors who gave it such a high valuation. And with Uber's management and priorities in flux following Kalanick's resignation in June and a months' long investigation into its workplace and culture, the company's ability and commitment to continue to develop Rush are more uncertain than ever.

Really when it comes down to it, (Rush) hasn't offered a significant benefit beyond what people have already.

Uber doesn't dispute that the success of Eats has forced it to rethink and lower its ambitions for Rush. But the company still believes it can become a major logistics player well beyond the realm of food delivery.

"We are thrilled to invest in the fast growth of the UberEats platform, while continuing to build technology that helps power delivery logistics for other businesses to offer more convenience for their customers," an Uber spokeswoman said.

But whether Rush will ever meet even these lowered expectations is an open question.

"Really when it comes down to it, (Rush) hasn't offered a significant benefit beyond what people have already," said Mike Ramsey, an analyst with market research firm Gartner. "There isn't a giant demand for delivery today, and where there is a giant demand for delivery, there's already infrastructure in place."

Rush, Ramsey continued, was "kind of adding on the edges."

SEE ALSO: Uber's CEO is on leave — meet the 14 new executives running the company

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Watch this Uber driver go through 236 consecutive green lights in NYC without stopping

What type of client is the “right fit” for your business?

Odds are your sales and marketing departments have spent a great deal of time and money answering this question. You probably have very detailed and accurate answers involving industry, company size, technology use and job title.

But you know that your sales team can call someone who fits your buyer persona perfectly and still end up without a sale. Why is that?

Because there is more to lead scoring than just fit. The lead must also have a need for your product or service and be ready to research and evaluate solutions. Unfortunately, you can’t tell whether a lead is ready by scoring them on fit alone. You also need to track their behavior.

If you score leads based on fit alone, you know who is qualified, but you still don’t know who is ready to talk to your sales people. Behavioral lead scoring is the second lead scoring model your business needs if it expects to have a full understanding of your lead’s quality and sales readiness.

Hopefully, you’re nodding your head in agreement so far. “Yes, we already track lead behavior through website visits, email clicks, content downloads and other engagements with our brand.”

That’s an important aspect of behavioral lead scoring. Unfortunately, it won’t give you the whole story. By the time a lead reaches your website, they’ve already done 60% of the research elsewhere online. By failing to track the activities a lead performs before they engage with your brand, you’re missing out on the first half of their research process! This creates a major blind spot in your lead scoring system and gives your sales team a lot of catching up to do when you finally discover the lead.

Social media intent data can help fill this blind spot.

How is Social Intent Data Used?

Many of your leads are leaving “digital footprints” online. As they do research on a business problem, they are posting on social networks, reading articles and commenting on blogs and third-party publications. If tracked properly, these footprints can tell you a great deal about your lead’s pain points, what’s top-of-mind, who they are connected to, and how to best target them. The information on social networks is some of the most valuable data because it is user-generated and typically fresh and accurate.

Using behavioral data to improve lead scoring has been around for years, but until recently, marketers have not had the technology necessary to score social activities. Now, social intent data can be matched with the leads in your marketing automation system to greatly improve your lead scoring model.

Keeping Up with the Increasingly Complicated Buyer’s Journey

With buyers conducting their own research, engaging with you in multiple channels and involving more decision makers than ever, the B2B buyer’s journey has never been more complicated. It’s for this reason that social intent data is just as important and valuable than your company’s firmographic and contact demographic data.

With so many buyers involved and such a long research process before your company is even involved, isolating your lead scoring only to prospects who come to your website and fill out a form gives you very limited visibility. You’re missing:

1. Everything the prospect did before getting to your website.
2. All activity done by the 90% of site visitors who remain anonymous (unless you are using web personalization).
3. Information on other decision makers who didn’t visit your site or fill out a form.

Intent data from the social web gets you much greater visibility earlier in the buying cycle.

In general, marketers tracking social behavioral data have been able to track more activities and have found socially engaged contacts are better leads. In using social intent data for our own lead scoring, Socedo found that over the course of a month the leads generated from social intent signals were 45% more likely to convert into opportunities, and in about two-thirds the time it traditionally takes to convert. They also closed at a 23% higher ASP.

Of course, there will still be some skepticism around using social intent data. Let’s address three of the major objections:

Social Intent Data is Unstructured

The barrier that has kept many marketers from adding social media data to their lead scoring models is that this data is unstructured. It doesn’t reside in tables, and you can’t just import it or push it into your marketing automation database.

But now, there is technology in place to process this unstructured data and make it consumable for a marketing automation system. Signals can be extracted from social media content and be matched to individual contacts in a marketing automation database. With this new advancement, social data has become useful for lead scoring.

Social Media Coverage is Too Low

Some marketers are thinking “my target audience is not very active on social.”

One concern of social media data is marketers may not have a lot of socially active leads in their database.

At Socedo, we’ve found that coverage of Twitter profiles in a typical marketing database is around 10-12%. But even if you can only find relevant intent signals on 10-12 % of leads in your database, depending on the size of your database, that may be hundreds or thousands of additional leads you can start engaging with every month.

For most B2B organizations only a small percent of the contacts in their database will ever engage directly with the company.

If the number of engaged leads in your database can go from 5% to 15% by adding social data, that can equate to a significant advantage for your sales and marketing teams.

Social Media Is Too Noisy and Difficult to Collect Real Intent Data

There is no doubt that social media data is noisy. There are over 500 million Tweets sent every day.

The key is to extract signals from the noise and develop lead scoring rules that work for your business. Here are a few tips to help develop your social lead scoring model that keys in on the specific activities that are relevant for your business:

• Compare social activity against known KPIs: The first step is just to start broad and track everything your leads are talking about; from engagements with your branded handles to competitors, industry events, and key influencers in your space.
• Look at how different social actions are correlating with your funnel KPIs. For example, you may find that leads who engage with certain topics or follow certain influencers on social are opening your emails at a higher rate than other leads, or converting into opportunities at a higher rate, or moving through your funnel faster than your baseline. By looking at the data, you can see which social actions should be incorporated into your lead scoring model.
• Talk to your sales team: Ask your SDRs and sales reps, if a lead took this specific social action, would you be able to have a good conversation with them? If the answer is yes, this is something you may want to lead score.
• Use a Predictive Lead Scoring Model: You can put social data along with all the other behavioral signals you already have through a predictive lead scoring model. By adding social as a new source of behavioral data, you’ll make your lead scoring model more predictive.

The way to cut through the noise is to constantly test whether social activities are an indication of the best possible leads for your business.

Continuously test and modify the social actions you are scoring for to get the most accurate model possible.

Marketers understand the value of listening to their customers and know that social media provides a rich pool of data to draw from. The only question is whether you can collect this data in a meaningful way and incorporate it into your existing lead scoring.

In the past, social data was only used as aggregate data for market research. Now, you can get social media activities at the individual contact level and reliably integrate that data with your marketing automation and CRM systems.

Social intent data won’t be the silver bullet for learning everything there is to know about your leads. But, when added to your existing lead scoring, it can cover a significant blind spot and give you a surprising amount of relevant, actionable data. Don’t let the objections keep you from benefiting from social media data.

Have any questions about lead scoring social media activities? Feel free to reach out!

The post Avoid Blind Spots in Your Lead Scoring with Social Intent Data appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Salespeople are a pretty tenacious bunch. They send email after email, make call after call, meet with prospect after prospect, then get up morning after morning and repeat. Salespeople work hard. But hard work doesn’t make sales — at least not efficiently.

Most B2B companies now understand the role content plays in marketing to generate leads. But many companies are still relying on “hard work” methods of converting those leads to customers. The reality is that content can create just as much magic for the sales process as it does for marketing. It can build the relationship, persuade, and convince.

When content is used effectively in the sales process, the role of the salesperson changes from pursuer/hunter (hard work that takes up a lot of time) to facilitator/educator (smart work that requires significantly less time). The sales process is not only made easier, but it’s also made shorter because content can work 24/7, when the buyer is available and ready.

What content does your sales team need? These three essentials are workhorses that will propel your team’s productivity forward.

1. Share Challenging Insight

To convince buyers to act quickly, you need to challenge their underlying assumptions that are blinding them to the urgency of solving their pain points.

Your biggest competitor isn’t the market leader in your industry — it’s the status quo. Buyers are taking a big risk by making a purchase, especially an enterprise-level one. What if something goes wrong? They’ll lose valuable time and, quite possibly, money. Challenging insights present the painful costs of not taking action. When the risks of purchasing your product or service are viewed in light of these costs, the risks are small in comparison.

This type of content should “look the customer in the eye and tell them what they’re currently doing is wrong.” Ideally, this content will also lead prospects back to your unique value proposition, so they’ll decide not only to act but to purchase from your company instead of another. What does your company do better than your competitors that enables you to solve your prospects’ pain points in a more thorough/faster way? Insights around that “what” are the ones you’ll want to focus on.

Types of content to use: White papers, research, statistics, and case studies that demonstrate just how much prospects have to lose by putting off a decision or by buying any solution other than yours.

How to use it: Share on social media, send (links, not attachments!) in prospecting emails and nurturing emails, and include in presentations and proposals.

2. Communicate Your Unique Value

The last thing you want is to educate prospects on the impact of pain points only to have them buy from a competitor. You’ll need to clearly communicate why your solution solves your prospects’ problems better than your competitors’ solutions do. CEB research which surveyed 3,000 B2B buyers across 36 brands across seven industries found that only 14% of buyers perceive enough meaningful difference between brands’ business value to be willing to pay extra for that difference. Obviously, companies are not doing a good job communicating their UVPs — which gives you an opportunity to create a competitive edge.

Types of content to use: Case studies, white papers, ROI comparisons, consultative analyses, demos, testimonials.

How to use it: After you’ve captured a prospect’s attention with your challenging-insight content, you should offer your UVP content through CTAs in nurturing emails and as follow-ups to phone calls. Some types of UVP content are ideal to follow others: for example, you can follow up an email where you shared a case study with an offer for a white paper or an ROI comparison.

3. Answer Questions

You’ll need responsive content during the final stages of the sales process. What questions do prospects ask? What objections do you frequently hear? You’ll want to make it easy for your sales team to access and share the answers to these questions. This content should still communicate your UVP, but it will be more detailed and deeper.

Types of content to use: Talk tracks, FAQs, one-sheets, capabilities brochures, product information sheets.

How to use it: This type of content is valuable at the bottom of the sales funnel. It should follow your challenging-insight content and UVP content. You’ll typically send this content via email after an initial presentation or use it in a follow-up call.

This workhorse content pulls a lot of weight quickly. It aligns your prospects’ needs and motivations with your company’s solution and adds an urgency that gets the deal done. Using this content in the sales process will boost your sales team’s productivity and your company’s revenue.

I read more than 100 outreach emails last week looking for examples for a post on powerful closing lines. But instead of inspiration, I mostly found examples of what not to do.

A bad final line can completely wreck your email. Not only is it the last thing your prospect reads, research shows it’s actually the most memorable element of the entire message.

The takeaway: If you want buyers to take you seriously and follow your call-to-action, you can’t screw up the last sentence. Read on for the lines you should never use again.

17 Terrible Email Closing Lines

1) “Is [product] something you’d be interested in?”

The answer might seem obvious to you, but the buyer needs more information before they can definitively say whether your product could be a good fit.

Plus, your email should end with a clear, specific, and relatively simple next step. If you don’t show your prospect a clear way forward, they’re probably not going to take action of their own accord. Buyers usually have multiple tasks and a long queue of other messages to tackle.

That means they don’t have the time or mental energy necessary to figure out their next move with you. Doing so is your responsibility.

2) “I know our product is a perfect solution for your needs.”

It’s pretty rare to have the “perfect” solution for someone’s needs. More likely, your product is the best fit or the strongest option. This sounds like an oversell, which will automatically damage your credibility.

Claiming 100% certainty before you’ve ever spoken with the buyer makes this line even more obnoxious.

3) “You’re probably not struggling with any of these issues. However, if you are, my customers have found that a quick call is the easiest way to determine if we’d be able to help.”

I was baffled to see this line in an outreach email I got last week. If the sales rep doubted that I was experiencing the challenges he’d just named, then why mention them?

This line would have been much stronger if he’d simply written, “If you’re struggling with any of these, my customers have found … ”

4) “If you’re not the best person at [company] to connect with about this, I’d love if you could direct me to the right one.”

There are two major problems with this parting line. One, you should be fairly confident that you’re emailing the right person. If you can’t tell who that is based on job title, use LinkedIn to research their individual responsibilities.

Second, never start a sentence with “I’d love … ” -- or any phrase focused on what you want, for that matter. Sales isn't about the salesperson, it's about the buyer. Don’t ask your prospects to do anything that’s in your best interest rather than theirs.

5) “I look forward to meeting your every need.”

Are you actually going to meet the buyer’s every need? Of course not -- they have a whole range of needs, and you’re trying to help with a specific one.

Promising to solve all of their problems won’t make them like or trust you more, it’ll only make them roll their eyes.

6) “We would be ecstatic to have you as a customer.”

Every interaction with your prospect should feel as natural and comfortable as possible -- and when was the last time you actually referred to yourself as “we” during conversation? Probably never.

As a general rule, you shouldn’t write anything in email you wouldn’t say out loud. Unless you’re genuinely speaking for the company as a whole (for instance, “We help clients improve quality by 10% on average”), use the first person.

Also, steer clear of over-the-top words like “ecstatic,” “thrilled,” or “elated.” People don’t like being pandered to, and these sound hyperbolic.

7) “If there is any more information we can provide, please let us know.”

Prospecting emails should be as short as possible. (After all, you’re working with limited attention spans and frequently, tiny screens.)

Don’t waste valuable real estate telling prospects you’d be happy to send them more information. If you actually want to seem helpful, provide value to them in your email. You’ll make the same point far more convincingly.

8) “Thanks in advance.”

This closing line is guaranteed to grate on your prospect’s nerves. You’re expressing gratitude for something they’ve neither done nor agreed to -- which usually backfires and makes them less inclined to do whatever you’ve asked.

It also makes you look lazy, like you can’t be bothered to thank your prospect until after they've actually fulfilled your ask.

9) “Thanks for your time.”

You won’t offend anyone with this final line, but you won’t impress anyone, either. It’s completely forgettable.

In addition, remember that you’re kicking off a mutually beneficial relationship. “Thanks for your time” makes it seem like the prospect is doing you a favor -- but the value is going to flow both ways.

10) “When, if ever, would be a good time to chat?”

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by adding “if ever” to your question. If you’ve properly explained the reason you’re reaching out, why you’re doing it now, and how you can provide value to your prospect, anyone who's a good fit should be interested in talking to you.

That doesn’t mean every prospect will take you up on your offer -- but don’t plant the seed in their mind.

11) “When would be a good time to chat?”

Even without the qualifier, this closing line isn’t great. You might think you’re doing your prospect a favor by accommodating her schedule; however, you’re actually creating more work for her.

She’ll need to pull up her calendar, find an open slot, ask if you’re free during that time, and finally, book the meeting. And if you aren’t available, there’ll even more back-and-forth.

Just the thought of all this often exhausts people -- so they’re programmed to reject the offer.

To reduce the cognitive load of your ask, provide specific options like, “Are you free Wednesday at 10 a.m. or Thursday at 2 p.m.?”

Better yet, use the HubSpot Sales Meetings app. Prospects can see your availability and instantly book a mutually compatible time.

12) “Are you free on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. or 11:30 a.m. so I can give you a demo?”

Asking for a demo in your initial email is like the waiter requesting a tip when he seats you: That step will happen, but you have to prove your worth first.

Once you’ve established trust with the buyer and shown them your product’s value, they’ll be eager to look under the hood.

13) ““Are you free on Thursday from 9-10 a.m. so I can walk you through the product?”

If it looks like a demo, sounds like a demo, and acts like a demo ... it’s a demo. Asking a buyer if you can “walk them through the solution,” “give them a tour of the product,” or “see it in action” is a demo request in different words.

Again, right move, wrong time.

14) “When you’ve got the chance, please give me a call at 867-5309.”

This suggested next step is far too vague. Your prospect doesn’t know when you’re free to talk on the phone, so they’re probably not going to call.

And if they do, and you’re already talking to someone? Now you’ve extended the process of connecting by anywhere from a couple hours to a couple weeks, since you need to reconvene and find a time that works for both of you.

Fortunately, you can dramatically shrink the timeline by giving them a couple dates and times to speak.

15) “I look forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.”

If only instilling urgency in your prospect was this simple.

Unfortunately, this line isn’t just ineffective -- it also sounds presumptuous. The buyer has no idea whether your product is a good fit for their needs, so they’re probably not dropping everything to return your email. Assuming you’ll get a response “at their earliest convenience” screams arrogance.

16) "Are you open to learning more about [company] and our capabilities?"

It doesn't matter who the recipient is or what they do, the answer to this question is "no." Your prospect may be interested in getting unique data, competitive intelligence, or surprising insights from you ... which will potentially lead to a conversation about your product and how it can help them accomplish their business goals.

But notice the focus is about the buyer, not you. Take a "me first" approach, and you're guaranteed to be denied.

17) "Let me know if I can get on your dance card this week."

Being a bit cheeky can help you break through the noise and show your prospect you're not just a robot programmed to sell, but a real person with a sense of humor. This line, however, goes over the line from "funny" to "awkward."

I also came across an email that ended with, "You're the cool girl at the party I've always wanted to talk to. Make my dreams and schedule a call?" Again, while being memorable is a good thing, this salesperson had taken things too far.

If you're ever unsure whether your humor is inappropriate, leave the joke out. Better safe than sorry.

Recovering from a bad first impression is nearly impossible. So don’t set yourself up to fail: Remove these cringe-worthy lines from your outreach emails right away.

To learn what you should say instead, check out these email closing lines and email sign offs that'll make a powerful impression on prospects.

Where there's life, there's death, and Silicon Valley is no different. 

For every billion dollar unicorn, there are endless numbers of start-ups that have passed into the ether — laying off their engineers in matching, branded t-shirts; closing down their game rooms filled with ping-pong tables; and leaving heartfelt goodbye notes for customers on their soon-to-be defunct websites.

We're halfway through 2017 and already a group of startups that together raised $1.48 billion have shut down. 

From February's shuttering of Beepi, a used car exchange once valued at $560 million, to this week's closure of gadget maker Jawbone, which was once worth $3 billion, these are the start ups we've lost so far in 2017 — and one whose demise looks imminent. May they disrupt in peace. 

SEE ALSO: A 500 Startups partner just quit, saying leadership was untruthful about the Dave McClure situation

Beepi: 2013 — February 2017

Capital raised: $150 million 
Peak valuation: $560 million 

Beepi, the website that brought together car buyers and used-car sellers, shuttered in February. Both Fair.com and used-car dealer DGDG considered buying Beepi, but ultimately decided against it. In the end, Beepi ran out of money. 

Quixey: 2009 — February 2017

Capital raised: $133 million 
Peak valuation: $600 million 

Quixey, a mobile search engine that was able to crawl apps, laid off most of its staff at the end of February. It seems the company never found its footing or a steady revenue source, despite replacing its founding CEO, Tomer Kagan, in March 2016. 

Yik Yak: 2013–April 2017

Capital raised: $73 million 
Peak valuation: $400 million

Yik Yak — the anonymous social media app that was at the center of several college harassment scandals — announced its closure on April 28, after struggling to keep users on its platform. The payment company Square acquired the Yik Yak engineering team days before the startup closed shop for a cool $3 million.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Why Your Sales Funnels Aren’t Converting, And What To Do About It written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of perfectly good sales funnels fail… in fact, people often come to me and say that their marketing must be the problem – because they’re just not making sales.

The truth, however, is that in order to make money in your business, you just need two things:

• An audience / steady traffic
• An offer that solves an immediate problem for them.

So if it’s that simple, how is it that some sales funnels just don’t convert?

1. Growth: Remember that your sales funnel and your traffic/lead generation strategy are two very separate things. Spending money on Facebook Ads without a successful sales funnel will not make you money. Likewise, having fantastic sales funnel that no-one ever enters will also not lead to selling successfully – you must have both lead generation and a funnel that works.
2. Nurture: Does your funnel nurture your audience? Some of your audience are going to be really warm when they get into your new funnel… and others will only have ‘met’ you in an advert. So you’ve got to make sure that your sales funnel actually nurtures the relationship that you’re trying to build as well as offers profitable opportunities for your business. A customer has a lifetime value – and by building better relationships with them, we build better revenue generation too!
3. Sell: Is your funnel selling appropriately to your audience – and are you making the most of each opportunity? For example, there’s a new trend to add four or five up-sells into your funnel. But statistically, cold audiences can get turned off if they go straight into a large list of up-sells. So remember to sell with value first. Keep your up-sells to things that are relevant or that expand on your initial offer, rather than things that the customer suddenly ‘must have’ in order to make the most of their initial purchase. We want them to feel great making the purchase and nothing leaves a sour taste in the mouth quite like an irrelevant up-sell or finding out that the product you just bought actually doesn’t work without XYZ webinar package/ e-book/ service.

And if we start to look at sales funnels as long term relationship builders, then we can start to use strategic sales and relationship building strategies to enhance the experience of the buyer – and increase your profits too!

For example, the highest converting funnels in my business performed exceptionally well due to three key elements that we have tested extensively over the last three years.

1. Personalize: Everyone likes to be identified as an individual – so please remember to grab their first name in your opt-in process. Your audience like to buy products or services that are tailored to their needs and anything that you can do to make the buying process more personal will reap rewards. Advancing technology means that it’s possible to use names, tailor videos and even send e-welcome cards and this all goes a long way in the eyes of your potential client.
2. Pathway: Give people a clear path and they will follow. Make that path engaging, interesting and relevant and they’ll stay on it forever! With my funnels, the aim is to enhance the customer experience across a variety of platforms. So I ask my audience to join our Facebook community, get onto my email list, join me on Facebook Live training/webinars… and the variety and value of activities (plus the different offers that they’re exposed to,) lead to longer term relationships, raving fans and higher profits. We also conduct regular market research to make sure that we’re creating the right offers for the right members of our community. Having a clear roadmap/ path for your audience members mean that they purchase the products/ services that will give them the greatest benefit and keep coming back for more.
3. Profit: My key phrase is ‘Sell Everyday’ because I believe that normalizing the pitch/ sale for your audience makes the experience less frightening for them. My audience knows that whether they land in automated or proactive sales funnel, they’re going to be exposed to pitches and offers – and they enjoy the experience. We also maximize profits by having a clear value ladder – which means that a lot of our revenue is generated after someone gets into the funnel and continues to purchase at a premium price point.

So if you’re struggling to see why your sales funnel isn’t converting, take it back to basics.

Are you generating high-quality leads and moving them through your funnel?
Is your funnel nurturing them and making them feel good… or is it crammed with tripwires and a ‘buy, buy, buy’ mentality?
Are you selling regularly? Or are you adding lots of value but rarely selling – and inadvertently terrifying your potential buyers?

On implementing these simple but insanely successful sales funnel strategies, your profits start to skyrocket – and more importantly, you create a community of ideal clients that want to buy from you every time you make an offer!

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About the Author

Jessica Lorimer is a Business Strategist and sales funnel expert who works with coaches to develop proven sales strategies to attract premium clients with ease so that they have more time, money and freedom and don’t have to worry about finding new clients every month. Jessica manages a thriving online Facebook community, The Smart Leaders Sales Society where she shows up daily and delivers training on attracting premium clients with ease. Connect with @jessicalorimer on Twitter.

Marketers, still treating your resume and LinkedIn profiles more or less the same? If so, you’re probably utilizing one (or both) the wrong way.

Your resume and LinkedIn account are undoubtedly among the best tools available to market your professional skills, experience and talent to marketing recruiting firms and potential employers. Unfortunately, many marketing professionals have the tendency to approach both of them with the same strategy, which means you’re not getting the most value out of either one.

Whether you’re actively job searching for a position in social media staffing or just want to put yourself in the best position to be approached by a marketing executive recruiter for new opportunities, treating your LinkedIn profile and resume alike will only hinder you from moving your career forward.

Make sure you’re approaching both your resume and LinkedIn account with different strategies to maximize your marketing career opportunities:

Understanding the Fundamental Differences

You’d think that experienced marketers would know the difference between a social media platform and a resume, but there is surprising confusion; even among experienced professionals and marketers.

Unlike many other social networks like Twitter or Facebook, it’s common for LinkedIn users to only visit and update their profile at a very specific time: when they’re in need of a new job. That’s where people fumble–LinkedIn is a space to represent yourself to an entire network of potentially millions of people, whereas your resume represents your personal brand to a small pool of selected recipients.

You don’t have to be a social media wizard involved with social media staffing to make personal use of this social network. To take complete advantage of LinkedIn, meet new people, follow up with previous contacts, interact on a casual level with others, share thoughts and interesting content, engage friends, have conversations, participate in groups, or even generate leads and sales. Publish content and develop your reputation as a thought leader. There is an abundance of opportunities at your fingertips (literally!)

On the other hand, your resume should remain efficient and professional with the sole purpose of promoting your qualification for a particular job. It should highlight your professional accomplishments with little of the conversational tone expected on a social network.

Length and Content

With a few exceptions, your marketing resume should usually be limited to one to three pages depending on your seniority. Efficiency, brevity, and proper prioritization are the name of the resume game.

LinkedIn is a good place for you to add the extra creative, personal flare that’s usually cut from your resume. Your work experience section is an opportunity to let your network know about your professional experience in a more descriptive and creative manner. Don’t be afraid to ditch the bullet point list that’s standard for resumes when leveraging LinkedIn.

Whether you have a strong track record as a top marketing leader or a long history performing at the cutting edge of social media marketing, provide potential employers and connections the relevant information about your history in an interesting way. Don’t miss out on a big opportunity just by showing marketing recruiting agencies and potential employers the same thing twice.

Some LinkedIn Profile Guidelines

• You have the ability to use much more space describing your work and accomplishments than a resume. But that doesn’t mean you should write an essay about yourself and every job you’ve had. Be efficient with your space; 2-4 paragraphs for a self-summary and each of your recent jobs is usually sufficient.
• Use your LinkedIn profile as an opportunity to provide supplementary information and content that compliments and builds upon your resume, rather than replicates it.
• For most marketers with developed careers, a detailed explanation of every job you’ve held is unnecessary. In general, you only need to describe the last 10 years or so of your work history on LinkedIn. Beyond that, simply listing your position and place of employment is usually enough.
• Your LinkedIn profile is a great place to put your personality and voice on display in a professional context that’s a little looser than a traditional resume or similar document. But that doesn’t mean it’s an “anything goes” social network like Twitter; be tactful with what you say and how you say it. If you’re unsure whether something is appropriate, it’s always better to err on the side of professionalism.

Customized vs. Universal

When applying to marketing jobs, it’s often wise to adjust your resume from job to job and company to company. Market your experience and qualifications to best fit each position. Some experience and skills will be more relevant for certain positions than others.

On the other hand, your LinkedIn profile needs to be appropriate for a broader audience. It isn’t narrowed for a certain role or organization. Anyone who visits your page will see the same content. Whether it be marketing recruiters, old college friends, potential employers, business prospects, or even complete strangers– the view will only differ based on your privacy settings.

Treat it accordingly! Include only information you’re comfortable with everyone and anyone viewing. A good tip is to also frame yourself in a way that presents you as an interesting, unique human being, and not just another qualified professional among many.

How to Approach Sensitive Information

Marketers are always eager to show their success to potential employers. How did you add value to your previous employer? How did you affect the bottom line?

Providing information on how you affected ROI is always ideal. But it can also get you in trouble if approached the wrong way.

Marketers are increasingly expected to report their success in terms of hard numbers: revenue earned, sales driven, margins grown, leads generated.

But that information is sometimes sensitive; some employers might not appreciate you publicly sharing internal reports and business information. So how do you make up for this on your resume and LinkedIn?

Resume

• Your resume is a personal document and in most cases you have some control who views it. You have more flexibility to share hard numbers–with discretion, of course.
• It’s usually appropriate (and often expected) that you share definitive figures related to your contributions and capabilities. In most cases, you should be able to cite statistics and KPIs relating to your productivity: YoY growth, profits, costs cut, etc.

LinkedIn

• With a much broader audience, it’s best not to publish internal business information in terms of dollars and hard figures unless specific granted permission by your employer. Keep this especially in mind if your previous employer was a private enterprise and not a publicly traded firm.
• To adapt your LinkedIn profile to the broader audience, talk in terms of percentage growth and comparison rather than hard numbers. Instead of sharing that you drove $1 million in new customer sales in one year, for instance, say that you “doubled” new sales, or increased them by X% over your tenure, or exceeded your goals by Y%.

Keywords

Search engine optimization isn’t just relevant for Google. Like many websites and social networks, LinkedIn contains a search engine of its own. This means marketing recruiters, potential employers, HR departments and professionals can search for a specific person or skillset using LinkedIn. Leverage this to your advantage by including relevant keywords on your profile. Don’t just simply fill your entire page with keywords, but do your research to see what people are searching for to get the most returns.

Implementing keywords in your profile can increase your chances of being noticed by your next employer. You can even get a head start on your next job opportunity through LinkedIn’s recent job preference feature. Now, you can let employers know you’re looking for a new job without alerting your current employer. You can also set your location preference for your next role.

Keyword optimization is important in resumes, too. It helps with standing out in the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) of recruiters and HR departments. You should always be more concerned with your resume serving as a private marketing document optimized for people, not robots. But if you can organically include some powerful keywords there, it can definitely help you show up to the right people at the right time.

Cover Photo

The cover photo is a small distinction between a resume and LinkedIn. By now, a majority of marketers should know it’s not necessary or beneficial to include a headshot in your resume. In fact, it’s one of the things we frequently recommend that they remove.

On the other hand, your LinkedIn should always include a professional high quality photo of you. It can increase viewership of your profile up to 14 times. Your cover photo should be professional, but it’s also a way to show off your creativity and personality.

Traditionally, the relationship between sales and marketing has been one of endurance rather than acceptance. Sales thinks they could do better marketing, and vice-versa. Each department believes they could do a superior job to what’s being done today.

On one side of the fence are the marketers. They believe they do most of the grunt work by generating, qualifying, and nurturing leads. Once the ‘suspect’ becomes a ‘prospect’ and has entered into the buying phase, marketing hands them over to sales – who simply takes the order (probably after giving a discount) and pockets a commission.

Salespeople, in contrast, think marketers are too remote from ‘real’ customers to understand the blood, sweat, and tears involved in closing a deal. Sales believe marketers have never had tangible face-to-face selling experience, so don’t understand or appreciate what’s involved to get a customer to sign on the dotted line.

The Evolution Of The Sales/Marketing Relationship

A combination of technology and its influence on buyer behavior has had the effect of moving the goalposts of where marketing stops and sales begins. Many companies had a customer acquisition funnel with the delineation of sales and marketing responsibilities looking a lot like this:

Marketing’s job was to identify prime customer segments and develop resonating brand and value propositions. To create and circulate materials, collateral, and messaging across relevant channels. The role may have even included organizing appointments for the sales team. Once that point was reached, the customer relationship was surrendered to sales, who became wholly responsible for making the deal happen.

Has Marketing Become The New Sales?

Then one day, businesses realized how expensive it was to run their sales processes like this. With all the investment in back-office work, it could take years for new customers to become profitable. Business owners and sales directors started talking about things like Customer Retention and Customer Lifetime Value. Organizations realized it was much cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. That meant ensuring customers stayed happy with their purchase, loyal to the brand – and less likely to take their money to the competition.

Around the same time, organizations started redefining sales processes as being either from either a Business To Business (B2B) or Business To Consumer (B2C) position. Since B2B often had larger numbers at the bottom of the order form, salespeople claimed ownership of it. They bought nicer suits, changed the title on their business cards, and become account managers. B2C, on the other hand, became perceived as being too costly for human beings to do. B2C sales reps were (and continue to be) replaced by marketing automation technology, driven by complex and powerful CRM software.

Today, the rapid evolution of customer behavior in its adoption of technology to make faster and more informed buying decisions have changed the traditional delineation between sales and marketing. Not only that, but technology previously deployed within a B2C space is increasingly being used in B2B. Having a person turn up at your office (regardless of what their new title is) to tell you about their company’s product or service and get you to buy it, can seem archaic. Customers know as much – if not more – about your product than you do. They do their own research, form their own buying conclusions, even arranging a demo or trial. They can order online, pay online, and track their delivery – without ever clapping eyes on a salesperson or picking up the phone.

Since the analytics, monitoring, and CRM systems used to manage this new customer relationship process are invariably driven by marketing departments, does that mean that marketing has become the new sales?

The Death Of Sales Has Been Wildly Exaggerated

Not at all. The role of sales hasn’t disappeared. It’s evolved.

The role of sales is migrating from persuading/cajoling/intimidating customers, to an advisory/consultative position of recommending the most appropriate solution for the customer. It’s less about “my widget is better than the one from the guy down the street”, to helping the customer understand the wider causes and implications of the problem they are aiming to solve. It’s about being – and being seen – as far more than ‘just another supplier’. It’s being considered as a trusted peer, representing a business the customer considers credible and reputable.

If marketing continues to head down the tech-based road of “Big Data” this, and “statistical analysis” that, surely there’s an important role to be filled in providing objective, customer-relevant advice and information to aid in the decision-making process. Such a role would also play an important part in an organization’s customer retention efforts. Win-win.

Perhaps the new customer acquisition funnel looks more like this:

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not (totally) belittling data-driven, Big-Data focussed marketing initiatives – as long as the application of the insights mined from such information is used intelligently to enhance the customer experience. Martech can mean the difference in delivering a relevant and timely piece of information that is actually read, rather than a piece of spam that is deleted. It can provide quasi-realtime information on the customer journey, online influences, programmatic advertising, and so on.

However, sometimes all a prospect wants is someone who understands their problem and can help them make the right decision. They don’t want – or need – a branded microsite, geo-located Snapchat filter, or VR experience. At the end of the day, buyers are human beings. Sometimes we just want reassurance that we’re making the right decision, and not buying a lemon.

Two Halves Of The Whole

As marketing continues its shift towards making sense of data and providing more useful buying decision criteria, perhaps the next iteration of the salesperson’s role is as much with customer engagement, retention, and loyalty building. Perhaps sales performance in the (near) future will be less about targets and quotas, and more about customer relationship quality measurement indicators such as how happy a customer feels after their purchase, their likelihood to repurchase, or how willing they are to recommend the product/service/brand to their friends or peers.

While marketing technology can have the effect of making messaging more timely and individual, it can at the same time make communication more impersonal. Perhaps the new role of sales is to re-inject that tactile, human, element into the transaction; even as the acquisition process itself becomes more automated.

Cold calling is alive—at least when you look at the number of posts proclaiming its death. Also, judging by the number of “cold calls” I get every day.

It’s unfortunate that a discussion about cold calling has to start with definitions and semantic disclaimers. Unfortunately, the most of the discussion are based on whatever definition or stereotypes one chooses. Usually, the definition and subsequent discussion is based on supporting whatever it is the author is trying to sell. Whatever the reason, we can’t have meaningful discussions about cold calling without a common framework of what cold calling is.

Social selling, many marketing, many inbound advocates leverage the stereotype of cold calls: A random, untargeted, unresearched, poorly prepared telephone call (or even a cold email), focused on pitching products. Based on this definition, cold calling needs to be killed! I couldn’t agree with the positions of people using this definition of cold calling more. Typically, these cold callers talk about the 100s and 1000s of calls they make–but they don’t talk about results, they just believe in quantity and are focused on dials. The data, both research and anecdotal, is horrible. It’s a waste of time on the part of customers and salespeople. It drives customers away and poisons the well for others.

There are others who praise the cold call–I’m actually one of those. We revel in cold calling because it produces results. But the problem is, our definition of cold calls is very different than the prior group. I have to make a certain number of cold calls a week–that is actually reach and have conversations with people. I know if I don’t, I won’t make my number in 12-15 months. Each person in our organization has to make a certain number of cold calls each week, for the same reasons.

These are people who we’ve never met or spoken to. For the most part, they aren’t expecting our calls and we are interrupting their days. But that’s where the commonality with the other group ends. Each of our calls is very targeted. We know our sweet spot, we focus exclusively on our sweet spot. They are deeply researched. Since we focus on certain markets, we are deeply knowledgeable in those markets–as knowledgeable as the targets of our calls, in some cases more knowledgeable. But we research the companies and the individuals deeply. We want to know as much about them, their companies, their priorities, and challenges as possible. We won’t make the call until we have an idea of what would be compelling and valuable for them.

As a result of that focus and research, we have an extraordinarily high “connect” rate. Earlier today, I completed one of those calls. I had originally planned a 15-minute conversation. But the customer wanted to keep me on the phone discussing his issues and how we could help for over an hour. And we have our next meeting scheduled!

Some of you might be saying, that investment in time is too much, there must be a simpler way!

Think about it for a moment. Yes, over time we’ve build deep knowledge in markets and industries. Yes, each call is focused on an issue that we are deeply knowledgeable in (for example right now my calls are focused on complexity and its impact on sales performance). So I don’t have to spend time researching any of those things, I’m already well prepared and knowledgeable.

Because we know what we are looking for, our customer research (enterprise and individual) takes about 30 minutes.

For roughly 30 minutes of research, we have virtually a 90% conversation/engagement rate within 3 attempts. (We do complement our calls with relevant email messages).

For those who are dialing madly, during that same 30 minutes, they may have made 100’s of dials, but their connect rate may be very low and their engagement rate is measured in fractions of percentage points. As a result, while we make far fewer calls, we produce great results.

Many of my peers, evangelists of the cold call will say the same thing.

Our disagreement with the “other camp” is really based on disagreement on what a cold call is.

So let me try to define it:

A cold call is a conversation with an individual you have never met or spoken with before. It is an unsolicited and unscheduled call–one they are not expecting, and an interruption of their day.

But a cold call is carefully targeted, carefully researched, carefully prepared. A cold call is never made until we know the value we can create for the customer.

That “stuff” we are subjected to by people masquerading as sales people–the untargeted, unresearched and unprepared call is not a cold call. It’s a waste of time.

Finally, high-performing salespeople, making high impact cold calls, never rely strictly on cold calls. They use whatever channel and method available. Inevitably that leads to the social selling argument—but I’ll save that for another post

Testimonial videos help businesses close sales. This is a fact that nobody can deny.

But do you know why that is?

It’s because testimonial videos build brand trust. Trust is the deciding factor for whether or not your customers will make a purchase – if they don’t trust your brand, they’ll back out.

Testimonials provide evidence that your product or service actually works as promised. In fact, 90% of customers admit that their buying decisions are heavily influenced by online reviews.

In this post, I’ll discuss what a testimonial video actually is, and how to make a great one for your business.

Let’s get started!

What is a testimonial video?

In simple terms, it’s a means for you to showcase the rave reviews of happy customers and allow them to personally vouch for the hard work you put into your product or service. It’s living proof that you provide value to your prospects, and a highly effective way to speak directly to website visitors.

It taps into the universal truth that we are all influenced by the opinions of others to some extent – a website with a customer testimonial video will inevitably generate more leads and close more sales than a website with no testimonial page at all.

Think about it: you can tell potential customers your product or service is brilliant until your lips turn blue, but it will never prove as powerful as showing real customers sharing their success stories.

A good testimonial video will always involve a real customer of yours endorsing your brand and your product. This customer will ideally be someone that once had the same struggles as your current prospects, and found a real solution in your offering.

Why not just use text testimonials?

Text testimonials are all well and good, but they fail to utilize one of your most powerful marketing tools – video. Not to mention that video testimonials are far more engaging and convincing than a page full of text. They will help reduce your bounce rate by keeping visitors on your site for longer and increase the odds that new visitors will feel confident enough to make a purchase.

We hear a lot in today’s world about how people are responding more and more strongly to visual marketing. According to TapSnap, visual content performs 4.4 times better than text-based content and 65% of audiences are visual learners.

Website visitors are also 64% more likely to buy a product on an online retail site after watching a video.

How do I prepare for making a testimonial video?

First and foremost, think about how your video should feel. The key terms you’re aiming for are ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’. A good testimonial video should also feel relatable: it has to feature real fans of your brand and natural, unscripted responses.

Why? Because nobody will believe someone sprouting a rehearsed or robotic opinion! Don’t be scared to show your real customers telling their real stories to ensure your testimonial video is engaging, credible and enjoyable.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put some planning into producing one. Creating video content can be tricky so enlist the help of people who know what they’re doing, including writers, filmmakers, video editors, graphic designers and animators.

Prepare a list of questions in advance, but don’t be too attached to them or get upset if your customer goes off track!

Remember that your featured customers are doing you a favor and treat their time as the precious commodity that it is. Plan ahead so everything runs smoothly, prepare the types of questions you want them to answer and be ready to prompt them if required.

This will not only help you get all the information you need, but also make your testimonial video feel professional and natural. Instead of having an interview with your ‘testifying’ customers, you could even try to make it a conversation.

Always give your subjects plenty of time to elaborate. You probably only have one chance to get them on camera. It’s always better to have too much information than to have too little.

What do I need to do during filming?

During filming, you need to remember to give context to your video. For instance, are you recording this conversation inside of an office? Is this office located in San Francisco, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Tokyo… or Mars?

Show some shots that give context to your viewers to add a whole new level of credibility to the video. You might want to punch in a geographic location or list the specific place in which the interview is taking place.

Small details add visual interest as well as brand context.

Here’s a great example of this principle in action from Phelps Agency.

What is the most important thing to focus on?

It may sound a little negative, but the most important thing to focus on is the pain points.

Your customer’s pain points are what your audience will identify with the most. So don’t leave them out! Encourage your clients to talk about the problems they were experiencing and how they found a great solution in your product.

Providing evidence that your brand is capable of solving people’s pain points (and is not afraid of discussing them) will make your audiences trust you a whole lot more.

Try to focus on the specifics of each featured customer’s buying journey as much as possible to help audiences differentiate between them and show that you truly care.

How about the editing part?

It can be daunting to be faced with a whole pile of raw footage and limited time/resources to whip it into visual magic. You might want to outsource it to a video editing professional.

But if you edit it yourself, the main thing to remember is to edit wisely. You obviously don’t want your video to be too long, but you should take care not to leave out any important parts of the conversation.

Wise editing involves:

• Stay true to what your interviewee has said
• Use advanced editing techniques to give your testimonial a good rhythm
• Layer music over the top (if appropriate)
• Ensure everything is in high-definition
• List any credits, make sure the sound is clear and consistent, and have some explanatory text surrounding the video so people know what they’re clicking on!

This WireBuzz HubSpot testimonial video is another good example of these elements in action:

It’s better to have a brief but powerful video than a long and boring one. Remember that above all else.

How do I promote my testimonial video?

So you’ve finally got your customer testimonial video ready and you’re really happy with how it looks. Great! Now it’s time to promote it.

Keep your video testimonials to one page on your website. Share them around with the featured customers and encourage them to share them with friends. You can even ask them to use a specific hashtag – chances are, they’ll be proud of helping you and will readily share it for you!

Be sure to let them know that any feedback is welcome and emphasize how much you appreciate their time and energy.

Next, send your testimonial video to non-featured customers who you think might be interested. Add a link to your testimonial page in your homepage, ‘About Us’ page and social profiles.

You might want to amp up the trajectory of your testimonial videos even more by posting it as an update on various social platforms. Simply write a catchy status like, ‘Want to see what our customers really think of us?” and ensure the link opens in a new tab.

If your business or brand has a LinkedIn Page, uses Google+ or other forums, put your testimonial videos front and center there as well.

Wrapping up

Testimonial videos are a form of high-quality content that can easily translate into customer trust, conversions and sales.

Showing a customer happily endorsing your brand is the best way to spark identification in your audience and give them the final reason they need to close a sale.

Remember to keep everything natural and ‘real’ – your customer’s testimony, your conversation with them and your video editing. Anything that seems rehearsed or scripted, loses credibility.

Oh, and never forget to get creative. To enlist customers to feature in your video, you can send out an email newsletter inviting them to showcase creative uses of your product or mount an iPad in your storefront or office where customers can leave their two cents worth in their own time!

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

While it is important to understand your personal metrics, mostly as a means of improving your use of time, and to develop an ongoing improvement process. While many know some of their metrics and conversion rates, few take time to explore and understand their prospects’ closing average or ratio. It’s easy to see why, you find yourself in front of what appears to a willing prospect, sharing what they want to do, why they are thinking of doing it, all while asking you questions that your manager taught you are “buying signals”.

Instinctively you feed the fire, figuring that the more information you provide and gather, the more your share with them, the more likely they are to finish their journey with you. All is good till the last scene, curtains close without a deal. Would have been helpful had you had an inclination earlier in the sale, when you may have been able to change the outcome. The change in outcome does not always mean a closed deal, but saved time, energy and refocus on better opportunities in your pipeline.

No matter how good things look, professionals in all fields know that the fundamentals need to be present no matter what the immediate circumstances look like. A key fundamental in sales is not just to understand the buyer’s buying process, but their buying habits or patterns.

No matter how bright and rosy things appear at any time during the cycle, it is important to confirm and validate. Failing to do that leads to a familiar situation for us all, i.e. no deal at the end.

How & Why

This is where asking two specific type of questions, from a couple of different directions will give you window the buyer’s buying habits, or let’s be real, a prospect’s “kicking tires” habits.

The Why

The why – as you’re are going through the Discovery process, ask why they choose the current thing (product, service, etc.) you are exploring with them. What they respond is important, but more interesting is how they respond. Someone involved with the decision will have not just more details, and as a result lay out more dots, but will also be able to tell you why those dots connect, and how they prefer them connecting. Someone who was tangential to the decision will deliver the same headlines, but no detail. Someone involved in the decision would describe things in first person terms, while those who were not, say implementers, will use third party description. You will also see who was able to drive a decision, and who could not; in the case of the latter, listen for who internally they blame for the decision, (or lack of one), those are the people you should pursue to connect and bring into the current cycle.

You will also get a window into how progressive and early to adopt they are, or are they the type that wait second or third iteration of a technology.

The How

Now that you have a sense around how they deal with their “whys”, why change, why that, or more like why not, it is time to turn to how they select based on the why.

“So now I understand why you chose to go with that kind of database, help me understand how you selected ACME Corp as the vendor?”

Much like above, you will be clearly able to tell if they were in the thick of it, or someone that was not invited to the offsite where the decision was really made. People may want to embellish, but you will be able to have a good view wit the right questions.

The reality is that everyone will paint a positive picture in the start, even the “Brochure Scouts” sent to gather information. Exploring their role in past similar decisions will help you gauge their closing average, which has a direct impact on yours.

The post What’s Your Buyer’s Closing Ratio appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

• Toni Thompson is the vice president of people and talent for The Muse, and a human-resources veteran.
• She said the top reason to leave your job is you've started doing bad work, because you're angry or frustrated.
• Thompson said you always want to leave your job on a high note.

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Quitting your job — especially if you don't have another full-time gig lined up — can be terrifying.

But there are tons of solid reasons to do it anyway: You feel sick to your stomach every Sunday evening. You don't think there's room to grow. Your personal values don't match up with your company's.

Yet there's another, more practical reason to free yourself from the drudgery of showing up at a job you hate: You want to leave on a high note. If it's gotten to the point where you've started doing bad work, it's almost certainly time to go.

That's according to Toni Thompson, the vice president of people and talent for The Muse, a popular job-search and career-advice site. Thompson has spent 11 years working in human resources.

When she visited the Business Insider office in June for a Facebook Live interview, Thompson explained what often happens: "You start doing bad work because you are so angry about your situation or frustrated."

Here's why that behavior should concern you. Thompson said you definitely shouldn't stick around in a job "where you are fully capable, and in the right role, and you were really doing great work" or "you're suddenly not doing a good job, and you've become a bad teammate and a bad employee because you're so frustrated."

"At that point," Thompson said, "it's probably best to just move on without a job so that they actually have a good memory of you."

You never know when you'll need to tap an old boss or coworker for a reference or some career advice. Quitting might seem like burning your bridges to cinders — but in reality, getting to the point where your employer wishes you would quit is a lot worse.

Watch the full interview:

SEE ALSO: 9 real people explain how they realized they needed to quit their job

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A behavioral economist reveals when it's time to quit to your job

At the end of last year, Twitter released a report on the 10 biggest marketing changes in 2017. They focused primarily on data analytics in real-time engagement. Strangely, they didn’t discuss the growing importance of using influencers.
This is probably because many brands underestimate the importance of social media influencers. They focus their efforts primarily on building their own social following.

Many brands focus on building relationships with as many users as possible. This is counterproductive for a couple of reasons:

• Many Twitter users have little interest in your solutions and will never drive leads to your brand.
• Maintaining relationships with too many users can be overwhelming.

Your best bet is to focus on engaging with these two groups:

• Potential customers that will ultimately add value to your brand.
• Potential ambassadors with a strong social following.

Kissmetrics advises brands to focus on reaching brand influencers before any other group. Influencers are industry experts with a strong presence on Twitter. In the marketing industry, these experts include:

• Eric Sui of Single Grain Marketing
• Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land
• Seth Godin of Yoyodyne
• Neil Patel of Crazy Egg

If you can find prominent brand influencers to represent your brand, then you will be in great shape.

Getting on an Influencer’s Radar

Here are some tips to earn the support of powerful influencers.

Identify the Right Influencers

You need to invest a lot of time and energy building relationships with Twitter influencers. You won’t receive much benefit if you focus on collaborating with the wrong ones. Unfortunately, it can be easy to overestimate the reach and respect influencers have. Some industry thought leaders may have a large following, but have lost the trust of their audience for one reason or another. It is important to do your due diligence first. Focus on the number of social shares they receive and read mentions about them on Twitter to gauge the respect they have earned.

Start with Influencers that Engaged with You

It is much easier to engage with a Twitter influencer that has already reached out or retweeted your content. Try using tools like Who Tweeted Me, Narrow and Commun.it to see who is interacting with you. If you notice that any of them are leading influencers in your industry, it pays to reach out and thank them for their support. If they reply back, it can be the beginning of a very lucrative relationship.

Ask Specific Questions

Once in a while, you should reach out to prominent influencers and ask them questions. They are flattered when people acknowledge their expertise. However, you can’t ask questions indiscriminately or they won’t be answered and won’t help foster a relationship. Here are some tips to follow:

• Make sure they can be answered in 140 characters.
• Don’t make it look like you are trying to get free assistance that you should be paying for. Many influencers are professional consultants that charge a fee for complex answers.
• Don’t ask routine questions that have been covered in their previous posts.
• Don’t ask simple questions that your audience expects you to know the answer to. It will damage your own reputation. Focus on the influencer’s area of focus instead.

Asking questions is a much more effective way to get a conversation started than retweeting an influencer’s content. However, you don’t want to overdo it.

Don’t Be Shy About Discussing Your Campaigns

Twitter influencers can be invaluable allies if you are running a new campaign. However, they don’t usually reach out on their own. You need to take the initiative and ask for their help. Make sure you have already fostered a relationship.

The best approach is to send a simple tweet stating that you are working on a campaign and could use their assistance. They will be more likely to reply and offer their assistance. You need a clear campaign goal before reaching out to them. Kajabi states that Twitter influencers can be great for building an email list, provided you follow the right approach.

The post How to Engage with Twitter Influencers appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Every website owner that is seriously invested in their online property and presence should be aware of the ranking factors Google uses for SEO. As of this writing, Google has updated their algorithm in ways that have caused major changes in ranking. In fact, many sites are still adjusting their strategies. As recently as June 25th-26th, Google has continued to make major changes.

Way back in time when the internet was first coming into use, one would surf for hours clicking links hoping you would land on a website and it’s pages that would answer your questions. During this time Google started as a search engine with the hope to solve that problem. The goal was to look at links to simplify things by grouping like content.

The idea behind this is to look at links are a “vote” for your sites trustworthiness. As an illustration, think about those you know professionally that you would call for business advice. Now imagine each person as a webpage and their knowledge as a link. That link to wisdom is what we look for online. If the person isn’t trustworthy, then you’ll likely not ever ask their opinion again. So you can see, links are important on your site to retain users.

Now, here are a few things to be aware of for your websites SEO:

Domain Authority (DA)

This is how Google sees your site’s (www.mysite.com) trustworthiness across all pages and articles you post. It’s important to not post about everything. Instead, just post what you know and what people are looking for. Attempts to manipulate your audience just to increase your DA could backfire. Don’t try to grab authority by randomly using current trending terms just to capture site traffic. It will hurt you in the long run. Remember Google’s slogan is “Don’t be evil” meaning users first, not site owners.

Page Authority (PA)

This is how trustworthy a page is on your site. You can pass PA along to another page via redirect. Still, be careful with this approach. Passing a page around on your site too many times looks suspicious to the search engine.

Sitemap

Sitemaps tell Google what pages you want it to crawl. It’s not important to submit a sitemap multiple times. Or in some cases, with regularly crawled sites, no submission is needed at all. For the majority of websites, sitemaps are necessary, and should be properly structured. If you are using a CMS, you want a sitemap plugin that can continue to update it. That way when the Google bot makes it’s next rounds on your site, it picks up the new pages.

Speed

No one likes a slow poke, and neither does Google. But with sites today, they are growing in size at rates that make some wonder if the hardware can keep up. Websites used to be less than a few Kilobytes (3-5kb). Now they are pushing 4 to 6 Megabytes (4-6MB). With larger sites comes more resources to serve the pages up faster. Since the internet provides us a wider audience, its important to remember a server in Ohio can’t serve a page as fast to users in California, or overseas. You’ll have to increase your hosting costs, and look at your website’s development, to squeeze as much speed out of it you can. Ultimately it comes down to time, and unfortunately, money.

Internal Links

Internal links are simply links on your webpage that can guide users to other parts of your site like related pages or posts. They also can take users off your site to where you referenced your content to other sites. This isn’t bad, if used in proper moderation. However, if you link to places that are not relevant to the page, post or even your websites topic, it can create a penalty. Keeping this in check will save you frustration from users, and thus make Google happy to give your site a more prominent position.

Backlinks

This is one that you have heard of if you have been involved in your website’s SEO efforts. It’s been turned into a buzzword quote often to “sell” services. In truth, it’s a major ranking factor because each link from a reputable site, is a vote “yes” in favor of you being a trustworthy online source. Talk to our marketing team about SEO and see if you can develop a strategy for this. It takes time, but worth it.

TF/IDF

TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) is a text mining technique used to categorize documents. You’ve heard “keyword density” used a lot over the past couple of years when engaging in SEO services. This takes that concept to a new level as it is a two part measurement. While density is a valid metric, around 5-7% as of this article, the frequency of used across all pages matter. The abbreviation TF stands for “term frequency.”

• TF(t) = (Number of times term t appears in a document) / (Total number of terms in the document)
• IDF(t) = log_e(Total number of documents / Number of documents with term t in it).
• Value = TF * IDF

Yeah it’s very technical and I’m not doing it justice probably, but you can more here if you want to dig in more.

Content Quality

Content quality is something we’ve blogged about on here a lot of the last few years. Google has made amazing strides from the days of just categorizing pages with links. Webpages are no longer static and simply scanned and served up on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The entire site is scanned from code to character.

If you are writing content, that is awesome! However, if you are not really trying, then stop and really think about who is your audience. What do they want to read? Are you are talking over them or to them? With quality also brings relevancy. The content must stay on point, and be what the user clicked on from the SERP. Don’t make your users angry. You won’t like it when they get angry.

Page Titles (SERP) & Descriptions

Page titles are pretty self explanatory, but a lot of site owners miss the importance or care it requires to name them. In the SERP, it’s the title that is in blue at the top of the result. The primary keyword is in front followed by a pipe “|” to tell the Search Engine that what follows is the secondary keyword. However, if these words are not on the page, Google will re-write these.

Descriptions are below the URL of the page. There’s always constant debate about the length of these. But in the mobile search age, it depends on the viewport (screen size). If you are interested into diving in more on what makes a good snippet, and how Google has recently updated them, check out the article here.

Robots Text File

In your servers main directory is a robot.txt file. A basic file should look like:

User-agent: [user-agent name]
Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]

examples:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /~joe/

This tells the Google bots to absolutely not index or craw these areas of your site. You can do advanced things with file and test whether or not Google can see it in your Webmaster tools account.

404, 301 and 403’s oh my

I’m sure a 404 error has been heard of before by those watching their visibility on search. A 404 is a resource not found, and the search engine will continue to fetch this, until eventually it stops and drops. This is not a good strategy, therefore, 404’s should be either re-directed as a 301 (moved permanently) or a new sitemap submitted to see if that resolves the errors.

Anything else should be address as soon as possible by your webmaster as they effect your websites ranking and visibility to users.

Check out a list of HTTP status codes.

We hope this article was helpful if you’ve been recently hit by the latest Google update as of June 26th 2017. Even though Google’s John Mueller’s saying there’s been nothing, I don’t think other SEO experts are buying it.

There's nothing confirmed from our side, this is all just random chatter. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 28, 2017

Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency dominated by white men, seemed on the verge of disappearing after every scandal, crash, or hack. But eight years later, it’s not only growing but accelerating, tripling in total value since January to over $45 billion. And it’s not the only cryptocurrency; competitors…

Read more...

I wrote a juicy ebook titled Master the Five Pillars of Power Publishing for the startup PowerPost and really want to share it with you.

The publication actually cites two authors because the many ideas presented in it come from the sharp mind of Paul Shirer, the co-founder and CTO at PowerPost. Paul agreed to an interview with me to help shed light on how brands must address the new demands of publishing online at scale.

Here’s that interview, followed by an edited transcript if you’re rather read.

What Is Brand Publishing?

I had to ask.

Barry: What is brand publishing, and is it the same thing as content marketing?

Paul: It’s really a mindset. What publishing does is make it more serious. If you’re becoming a publisher, you have to actually have the right scheme and the right processes. You have to live and die and survive with your content. So it has to be the means to drive your business.

When you take that mindset, it really has a transformational effect on the way you view your current content marketing program. Suddenly, now, you are going, “Wait. Have we written down our mission? Do we have a team that is aligned with this? Are we hiring the right people? Do we have a plan for content in a very strategic way? Do we have the technologies to scale a real publishing program?” And at the end of the day, is it high performing content per the investment dollars you’re putting in?

It’s much like what a publisher would have to face. Inc.com or some other publisher like CNN, they can’t just put out content that does not drive audience and does not drive some level of conversion or doesn’t satisfy their advertisers, etc.

So that switch, if you will, or that flip of the mindset to say, “I’m a publisher, versus just a content marketer,” is where we see the difference.

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Brands must address the new demands of publishing online at scale.
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The World Is Your Website Now

Barry: Traditionally, a publisher basically takes care of making a publication, but now a publisher has to publish all over the place. You’ve got to be where your customers are. That’s definitely not only a website.

I just read a great ebook co-written by Jay Baer of Convince & Convert and Jeff Rohrs of Yext, The Everywhere Brand. Its thesis is that giving your brand visibility requires being everywhere and thinking beyond the web, beyond your website, or even apps. Does that resonate with you?

Paul: Absolutely. Where you need to be as a brand is obviously getting bigger and bigger. It’s where your audience is, number one, so it’s always the litmus test: Where’s my audience? You meet them where they’re at. You can’t expect them to come to you.

You have to give in to the idea that the world is your website now—that everywhere is where you need to be—to the degree that your audience is there.

Embrace the idea that there are multiple connection points for your audience and your content needs to be distributed in different channels for different types of people.

Content Supply, the First Pillar of Power Publishing

For the rest of the interview, I simply prompted Paul to help expand on the five pillars of power publishing detailed in the ebook.

Barry: Let’s have our audience understand what PowerPost calls “the five pillars of power publishing.” What’s involved in this first pillar, the content pillar?

Paul: We might call it “content supply” to give it more definition. At end of the day, you need the right content that’s going to resonate with your audience, and you have limitations.

How much can you produce? How much can be intelligently adapted for the different types of target audiences quickly and easily? It opens up a whole can of ideas, of ways in which you can do that.

We know that you can produce your own content, whether it’s images and infographics and videos. There’s a whole cycle of operations that goes with that and cost factors, too.

Then, of course, you can curate content in intelligent ways. But ultimately you have to begin to look at what your overall objective is. As you start to become more serious, you realize you might need to outsource, or you might need to get real professionals that really know how to actually spin the content the way you need it. You might need to look more into evergreen content or “pillarized” content, if you will. There are so many options when it comes to content supply.

One of the biggest pains that brands face is getting a systemic, strategic way of supplying content for the ongoing needs of their target audiences and distribution channels.

Workflow, the Second Pillar of Power Publishing

Barry: Flip the page. Pillar number two is a workflow. Talk to me about workflow. It seems like some people simplify it down to email and G-drives or whatever, and some people buy software.

Paul: There is no one way. You’ll find a hundred different ways in which people work. We may like email better. Maybe we like Slack. Maybe we like Google Calendar, Basecamp—all those types of things. But if you really are going to put together the pieces of the puzzle for publishing, you can’t just ad hoc that piece of it and then be able to evaluate how well you’re doing.

If you are getting the types of content you want on the front end, next is workflow. How are you going to do it efficiently? How are you going to get it through review processes? How’s the creative artist going to touch it properly? How are you going to plan different types of pieces per campaign, per personas?

It starts to become really daunting if you’re just opening up Excel sheets or opening a Google Calendar or whatever other tools you use. So if you want to become serious about that, ultimately, I believe, you have to invest in some level of automation technology for your workflow.

It brings your team together in one place. It allows you to methodically plan the type of content you want for all the different distribution channels. Once you’re doing that, then you can actually perform some analysis as to how efficient you are, how well you’re doing, and where your major bottlenecks are.

Distribution, the Third Pillar of Power Publishing

Barry: Distribution has to be a pillar when you introduce the idea of social media and your many channels. If you’re hopping from one to another all day long, you’re probably burning a little bit too much time, right?

Paul: Yeah. One of the fun phrases we use is, “You need to get tab closure.” The idea being, you have all these tabs. You’re trying to manage all that stuff—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WordPress—and so you’ve got all these tabs open.

What we’re seeing is tools and technologies are integrating all these channels in one place. So you now are moving down the process of, “I’ve got my content, I work with my team, now I need to get this stuff out to where I want it to go.” Depending on the company—B2B, B2C, large, small, etc.—different vertical sectors, you have different needs or different wants for different channels. Ultimately you’ve got to get a plan together, and our answer would be using automation to distribute content.

Conversion, the Fourth Pillar of Power Publishing

Barry: Turn the page once again, and you get conversion. This is where it gets interesting because whether we want to call it brand publishing or not, we do it for marketing purposes.

Paul: No doubt about it. Nirvana would be, like, “We produced a piece of content, it went through some level of distribution, and it drove a customer all the way back and someone actually signed-up for our service or product and paid.”

That’s the most amazing conversion that you can get, but now, along the way, what’s the value of, say, micro-conversions as you go through the process? You have to put value on it because there is something to all your different objectives.

If you really want to get a handle on them, you would look at the entire life cycle of a piece of content. The first thing is it’s distributed on some channel somewhere. Then you’re looking at micro-conversions along the way: Are they engaging with it? Are they clicking? Commenting? Sharing? And then, ultimately, is it driving people to some owned area or some conversion area to sell your product?

The more you get a handle on this conversion maze, if you will, this lifecycle of content and the way in which your audience is engaging, the better. That’s what a publisher has to do, or they lose.

Analytics, the Fifth Pillar of Power Publishing

Barry: We have to analyze this stuff. That always seems to come up last, but it’s kind of a circle. It doesn’t end with analytics. A lot of what you do begins with analytics.

Paul: Yeah, it’s all intertwined. I keep talking about that lifecycle of a piece of content because you need data points along the way for analytics to work.

One of the things we’re investing heavily in is the front end of a piece of content. That is saying you’re wrapping intelligence, if you will, or analytics around it on the front end. Getting a really good handle on the front end of it is going to give you a better back end result. Also, wrapping that intelligence, giving it something that you can track, UTM codes obviously, and URL shorteners, and things like that.

So then it goes out the door, and again we go through those micro-conversions, hoping to drive prospects back to your website or eventually drive sales.

How much of that can we get a handle on? And to what degree can we report on that? Maybe you’re segmenting your reports. You’re saying, “How well did I perform according to this persona? How well did I perform for this channel? How well did I perform during this date range?”

The key is to get enough intelligence injected into that lifecycle of the post so that you can actually produce the types of reports or the segmentation of data that helps you do better, and, again, perform in front of the world as a publisher.

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

Eric, 33, a high-potential vice president at a financial services firm, was elated to be selected by his supervisors to receive executive coaching. This meant he was being groomed for ascendance. His boss wanted him to be a more motivating leader to his team. In coaching, while Eric focused on learning ways to motivate the talent on his team, he didn’t address deeper issues, like his perfectionism, that could hold him back in the long run.

Frances, an executive in her forties, entered coaching after being passed over for a promotion that went to her more vocal, visible male colleague. While her goal was to increase her political savvy, she also expressed interest in delving into the root of the issue, namely her proclivities to defer to authority and shy away from the spotlight. Through coaching, she learned to project a powerful demeanor that was genuine and compelling. Within a year, she achieved the promotion she sought.

In our work coaching hundreds of executives, we have suspected a difference in how 30-something executives and those in their forties and fifties approach coaching. The 30-somethings have tended to be more difficult engagements, often requiring more directness, cajoling, and nurturing.

Because organizations are increasingly focusing on early talent development to attract and retain young talent, it’s important to understand the best way to accelerate their growth as leaders.

We examined data from 72 executive coaching engagements we conducted from 2008 to 2014. Our data included executives’ scores on personality and emotional intelligence assessments, interviews with their managers and HR, and our case notes. The average coaching engagement lasted six to 12 months. The executives came from a wide array of industries, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, and media. We divided the sample into age decades: 18% were age 30–39; 61% were 40–49; and 21% were 50–59. The gender breakdown was 54% male and 46% female.

In each case, one of us served as the executive coach and worked with the executive to set their individual goals. These ranged from commanding greater influence to building a strategic vision, aligning their team, and refining their interpersonal and communication skills. Next, one-on-one coaching meetings focused on expanding their insight; learning and practicing skills; applying learnings to their work in real life; and reflecting on those actions and outcomes. Meetings averaged one to two sessions per month.

The goal of our research was to identify how executives in their thirties might differ from older executives when they receive the specialized attention of executive coaching. We also wanted to ascertain whether differences were due to age or generation. Our study was published in Consulting Psychology Journal in December 2016.

We gave each executive a low, medium, or high rating on the following four dimensions:

• Responsiveness: whether they demonstrated enthusiasm for the opportunity for coaching
• Self-reflection: how well they explored factors, such as personality style, motivation, and cultural background, to better understand their behaviors that work well and those that don’t
• Nondefensiveness: whether they tended to accept personal responsibility for interactions or events that went awry
• Degree of change: how much they demonstrated noticeable change in their executive style, technique, and output during and at the end of the coaching engagement

To maximize objectivity and scientific rigor, we used research-based behavioral criteria to determine each rating. For instance, one of our criteria for evaluating responsiveness was whether the individual “makes reasonable calendar accommodations to schedule coaching sessions,” which demonstrates their commitment to working on the content of the engagement. And for self-reflection, one thing we measured was whether the person “willingly examines personality issues (e.g., perfectionism, conflict avoidance) that interfere with effectiveness.” We measured degree of change based on our observations and the input of the executive’s boss and HR.

Each of us rated our own clients, making sure to cite behavioral examples to justify each rating. Of course, we recognize there is bias inherent in nonblind coding. Therefore we also scrutinized each other’s data to ensure the examples supported the rating or to suggest a modified rating.

Two statistically significant outcomes emerged. Regardless of gender, executives in their thirties had lower ratings on self-reflection, and their level of change was less dramatic than that of executives in their forties and fifties. We also found that the younger executives tended to respond to concrete recommendations and specific rules or guidelines to follow, but they often did not show interest in understanding why they did the things they did. Older executives were more curious about the reasons for their behavior — they wanted insight, as opposed to rules, to drive behavior change.

We believe three factors could be behind such differences. First, being identified as a high potential at an early age may reinforce one’s self-perception of being a winner who does things right. This could explain why younger executives treat coaching as a perk that can be beneficial, while older executives are more eager to learn more about themselves, expand their options, and welcome a confidante who challenges their thinking. In fact, classic lifespan literature indicates that adults become more open over time and less entrenched in their thinking.

Second, the younger executives in our sample tended to miss subtlety and nuance in human behavior. They were more likely to operate based on black-and-white ideals, such as, “There is one best idea that should prevail” or “I am running a pure meritocracy.” For example, Carl, 38, believed that a lack of conflict with his team members indicated agreement. He would be surprised to find out later that his colleagues were working against his agenda. In coaching, we focused on helping him learn the subtle cues that indicate people do not agree, such as a lack of timely follow-through. On the other hand, older executives we coached were already more attuned to discrepancies between what others say and what they actually do.

Finally, younger executives more often believed that there is a “right” way to do things, whereas those in their forties and fifties were typically more willing to try out different approaches. For example, Andy, 37, believed in always speaking his mind and being authentic — but his bluntness cost him trusted relationships. While Andy remained adamant about the value of authenticity, coaching offered him concrete actions for how to communicate in an authentic and inoffensive manner. On the other hand, Beth, 51, preached the “carrot over stick” approach in motivating her team. Through coaching, she recognized the limitations of this singular concept and was easily able to adapt it without concrete templates for action.

Importantly, our statistical analysis found that executives’ behavior in coaching differs by age, not generation. Ratings varied across, not within, each of the age decades we studied (30–39, 40–49, 50–59). This is consistent with classic lifespan literature that describes ongoing maturation during each decade of adulthood. The thirties are often characterized by intense activity to establish the foundation for a successful career; this involves mastering rules that win approval. In contrast, the forties often involve a turning point from novice to mentor, which may bring a deeper appreciation for life’s paradoxes. The seasoning that comes with age includes expanding one’s appreciation for subtlety, ambiguity, and imperfection.

In light of these findings, we recommend two approaches for those who manage, mentor, or coach younger executives to help them reach their full potential.

The first involves allowing them to experience a difficult “moment of truth,” as opposed to shielding them from it for fear of demotivating them. It could include disappointment about a high-visibility project gone awry, a missed promotion that was believed to be a sure thing, or unexpectedly negative 360-degree feedback. The moment of truth can instill a greater readiness to change behavior.

The second entails framing coaching advice using concrete if-then scenarios and templates for behavior. For example, we might advise an executive who is working on building better relationships with coworkers: “If you relinquish this battle, then you are more likely to create an advantageous relationship,” or “Here are the three things to say to a resistant stakeholder.” Insights delivered this way feel like “rules” for executive success, which tend to resonate with rules-bound 30-somethings.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Many in sales look at summer as a time where they can slow down a bit, reflecting what they believe to be the pace of things around them. That’s just wrong on so many levels, that we’ll leave it to others to analyze, our focus is Execution, improved Execution. So rather than following the 80% of your peers who go into summer mode, I instead invite you to use the summer to improve your prospecting skills so can remain in that 20% that drives the economy, the 80% is piggybacking on.

Every Thursday in July and August, the posts in the Pipeline will focus on a specific element in Proactive Prospecting. While this in itself will put you on the path to better prospecting, meaning a fuller pipeline of better opportunities, you can take it a step further by enrolling in the Proactive Prospecting Program on Sales Gravy University. Consisting of instruction by me, exercises, and tools, the same program clients have used to increase conversions and pipeline by over 25%. Enroll in the program today, and use the Thursday Proactive Prospecting Summer series to keep you on track, and filling your pipeline. By the end of the summer you will have both more opportunities in your pipeline than the 80% who “took the summer off”, but the skills that will keep you ahead.

Today we will look at two important sometime related often confused fundamentals, Objectives and Execution.

Objectives

As you know I am not a big fan of pain in selling, not because I am squeamish, but because buyers in pain are a small part of the overall opportunity, they are pursued by everyone and as such feel entitled to “a better deal” instead of the right deal. The largest pool of opportunity professional sales people have are those buyers not impeded by pain, but are focused on achieving their business Objectives. If you change your narrative from pain to Objectives, you will be communicating to, and heard by a greater segment of the market, a segment ignored by the 80% who are “jonesing” for pain; let’s look at that for a sec.

Every business and business person has Objectives. Some will run into a problem along the way, usually about 10%, and they will seek to relieve that pain, but then get back on track to achieving their Objectives. So to engage more meaningfully with a greater segment of the market, you need to forget pain, and embrace Objectives. The best way to do that is to actually set your own Objectives, and experience the opportunities and challenges in achieving them. This will give you the ability to empathize with others who are focused on Objectives, not just pain.

Here’s what you do, right now: write down your objectives for this program, no more than three, you gotta be real. Make them specific, “I want to be better at starting the call”; “Communicate value more effectively”; “Have my voice mails returned”, you name it, but set a clear, realistic Objective based on where you are now, and where you’d like to be by Labour Day.

Execution

We all know success in sales is all about Execution, everything else is just talk; so while setting Objectives is a step in the right direction, actually doing it is another. Some of you may be familiar with the old riddle:

Five frogs sitting on a log – four decide to jump off, how many are left on the log?
While most answer one, the answer is five.
Deciding to do something and doing it are two different things!

You Have To Jump

No matter how good a set of Objectives we set, they are worthless till executed. I’ll challenge you with an Objective: Focus on correcting what you did wrong, rather than waiting for perfection to try.

Feel free to e-mail me directly as you take advantage of the many things you’ll learn in your Proactive Prospecting Summer and the Proactive Prospecting Program on line.

The post Proactive Prospecting Summer – Part 1 appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

There almost always seems to be a discussion or debate between what qualifies as an opportunity in sales. The decision criteria can be all over the place. Some folks use BANT, other use Medic. Some use their homegrown criteria?

The definitions of what makes a sales opportunity a sales opportunity are robust and varied.  In spite of the various number of definitions, there is one absolute requirement to a sales opportunity. It doesn’t matter what else is present; it’s not an opportunity if this element is absent.

A real sales opportunity requires the prospect to commit to going on the sales journey with you. It requires the prospect commit to engaging with you and participating in the sales process. Without that, there is no opportunity. You’re not selling to yourself.

That’s it.

Everything else is just additive. You can’t sell to yourself.

This goes for deals where the prospect goes dark. If a prospect is no longer calling you, if they’ve stopped responding to emails, if they aren’t showing up to meetings and they are not engaging, you’ve lost the deal. It’s no longer an opportunity.

At the end of the day, opportunities need one key element, an engaged prospect who is willing and able to go on the sales journey with you. If you don’t have an engaged buyer, you don’t have a sales opportunity, period.

Build as robust or as simple an opportunity criteria as you prefer, but at the end of the day remember it’s not an opportunity until and only when the buyer says; “Yes, I’m interested in talking to you more about this, let’s do it.”  Everything else is there to make us feel good.

Make sure your buyers are truly engaged and participating in the sales process, ’cause if they’re not, you don’t have an opportunity.

 

The post The Key Requirement To A Sales Opportunity appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Have you ever wanted a peek inside the mind of a top salesperson? Although every rep has their own unique selling style, strategy, and process, their mindsets are surprisingly similar.

That might be because, as HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre often says, “Success in sales is 90% mental.”

With the right attitude, you can win business in seemingly impossible situations. So if you want to be one of the best, model yourself after these 15 characteristics.

1. They believe in their product.

Successful salespeople genuinely believe in their product’s value. This conviction comes through loud and clear when they’re talking to prospects, helping them break through resistance and doubts. Believing in their product also helps salespeople avoid discounting — they know the price tag is justified.

2. They empathize with their customers.

The most successful reps have spent a lot of time getting to know their typical buyers: Their challenges, top priorities, daily responsibilities, fears, and so on. And they’re not just familiar with their prospects — they also empathize with them. Because great reps see their prospects as actual people, they build stronger relationships.

3. They want to win.

That being said, top-performing salespeople aren’t purely motivated by the desire to help their customers. Helpfulness is a huge component of their selling personality — but so is competitiveness. 

Salespeople who love to see their name at the top of the leaderboard almost always do well. Even if a rep doesn’t care about beating their teammates, they still want to beat their personal records for deal size, business sold, and quota attainment.

4. They're resilient.

Every salesperson hits a slump at some point. Low- and mid-performing reps usually panic, but top-performing reps recognize freaking out doesn’t solve the problem.

In fact, this reaction can make a slump worse — once you’ve lost confidence, basic selling activities become enormously difficult. In these situations, the best salespeople stay calm and figure out a game plan.

That might be revamping their messaging, setting mini-goals they know they can hit for a quick confidence boost, talking to their sales manager, or ramping up their activity.

5. They’re paranoid.

High sales achievers don’t let themselves mentally count a deal as "won" until the prospect has signed the check. This paranoia helps them spot and avoid potential landmines.

For example, an optimistic rep might take the buyer’s promise to speak to their boss at face value. But a paranoid rep will say, "That’s great. When are you planning on talking to your manager? And would it be possible for me to be there to support your argument that …?"

6. They're focused.

Great salespeople know exactly what they want, when they want it, and who they want it from. This single-minded focus gives them impressive control over the sales process. To illustrate, let’s say Erica, a Senior Account Executive, is calling a new prospect. She wants to talk to the prospect’s CTO.

With that objective, Erica doesn’t get distracted when the prospect offers a meeting with a head engineer. Instead, she replies, "Since this purchase would impact multiple teams, the CTO usually needs to get involved early in the process. She’ll appreciate your foresight in setting up a meeting, rather than bringing her in later and having to start from scratch."

7. They're passionate.

Good salespeople like what they do. Great salespeople love it. The pure joy of selling helps them cope with the unpredictable, highly stressful environment. They can’t imagine getting hooked on another job the way they’ve fallen for sales.

8. They're efficient.

Amazing reps are ruthless with their schedule. If they can automate an activity, they will. If it’s not productive anymore, they’ll stop doing it. Good luck asking a top-performing rep to sit through a long, useless meeting or irrelevant training — they’ll either take out their phone or laptop or stop showing up to future ones.

9. They put in the effort.

You won’t meet a top-selling rep who goes home early or spends every other Friday at the beach. Talent is important in sales, but so is hard work. After all, you can’t use your skills to convince a reluctant prospect to buy if you haven’t gotten them on the phone — which requires several preliminary steps, like prospecting, qualifying, and reaching out to them.

Not only do great salespeople put in the hours, but they’re also willing to fight for every account. That might mean taking a call at 8 p.m. because that’s when the prospect is free — or getting to the office at 6 a.m. to do some extra prep for an important deal.

10. They focus on the factors within their control.

Most salespeople recognize early on that their success is contingent on some external factors. If the gatekeeper is having a bad day, they might not let you through no matter how persuasively you frame your request.

If the buyer just lost 50% of their budget, they may not go through with the purchase no matter how well you’ve demonstrated value. If the decision-maker used your competitor at his old company and loved them, you’ll probably lose the deal no matter how effectively you sell.

But successful reps don’t spend much time dwelling on these things — that would be pointless. Instead, they direct their mental energy toward what they can directly influence. This attitude keeps their passion and enthusiasm high and ensures they’re spending their time productively.

11. They offer meaningful insight.

The best reps know that no two prospects are the same. They understand that businesses are facing their own challenges, operating under their own circumstances. So when they interact with prospects, they don't stick to some rigid script, spewing generic talking points.

Instead, they make a point of understanding where their prospects are coming from to produce meaningful insight based on elements like professional common ground and familiarity with similar businesses.

Exemplary reps don't just mull over a product or service's bells and whistles — they make pointed pitches that cover how well they understand a prospect's individual situation before demonstrating how their solution is best equipped to remedy the problems they're facing.

12. They're honest.

Integrity has always been the best policy in sales, but in an age where consumers are more savvy and well-informed than they've ever been, it's becoming more of a necessity than a virtue.

The best sales reps are honest in both their intentions and their tactics. As I touched on earlier, they sincerely believe in the solutions they're selling. They understand their product or service's limitations just as much as its benefits.

They don't over-promise benefits or downplay legitimate concerns. In short, the best reps can present their solution — as it is — and demonstrate why it will work for their prospects without smokescreens, deliberate ambiguity, or flat-out lies.

13. They're always learning.

The best sales reps understand that sales is a fluid, constantly evolving practice. New sales trends, strategies, and technologies emerge all the time, and top-selling salespeople stay abreast of those developments. 

They're often interested in attending events like sales seminars. Many are willing to reach out to managers and sales leaders within their company to schedule short meetings to see if they can get some tips on how to improve their sales efforts. And when a sales org starts to leverage new technology, they're the first ones to buckle down and master it.

This point is a combination of humility and determination. They understand perfection isn't attainable in sales, but they're still motivated enough to chase it.

14. They're always well-prepared.

While top-selling sales reps know how to think on their feet, they very rarely wing it when interacting with prospects. The best reps know that if they're going to get the most out of a call, demo, meeting, or any other engagement with potential customers, they have to know their stuff.

Top-performing reps conduct extensive research on their prospects and, in turn, know how to best personalize and articulate their value proposition. They also have the proper materials they'll need on hand and consider potential objections ahead of time.

Though there's no way to definitively predict every hitch you might run into when conducting a sale, the best salespeople still buckle down and thoroughly prepare to account for as many as possible.

15. They emphasize relationship building.

Sales is inherently relationship-oriented. When done right, it's a matter of establishing connections and building trust with prospects and peers. And the best sales reps have the authenticity, empathy, and motivation to do that on a consistent basis.

Top-selling salespeople can add a personal element to their engagements, conversations, and deals. They take a sincere interest in their prospects — making an effort to understand their circumstances, interests, and personalities.

They don't see deals as purely transactional. Instead, they take them as opportunities to connect with prospects and meaningfully improve their operations.

They're not reluctant to follow-up with customers and clients, making a point to constantly lend a hand to those who've already sold to. Sales is a long-term game, so top-selling salespeople know how to forge long-term relationships.

Greatness is, by definition, hard to obtain. By modeling yourself after the best of the best, you’ll bring yourself much closer to their results.

It should be no great revelation to this industry that rapport-building conversations with consumers are an effective way to earn sales. That’s right – it’s not all about emails. A good old fashioned sales call (especially inbound) is the perfect opportunity to establish the foundation for a positive relationship with your prospect.

The More Connected We Are, The More Separated We Become

As online efforts become a priority in an increasingly digitized world, some organizations may undervalue the continued importance of human interactions.

This failure to realize that inbound calls remain crucial within a sales strategy is both an unfortunate oversight and a costly one, with research now indicating that plenty of prospective buyers still like to reach out and touch someone.

As a performance marketing company, we were in a position to gather critical data about these conversations.

We recently analyzed hundreds of thousands of phone interactions to understand how various industries fared during 2016 and beyond based on call lengths and conversion rates.

We also assessed when these dialogues are most likely to take place, ultimately garnering some worthwhile takeaways that every brand and its sales professionals should know.

Here are some of the unique discoveries from our 2017 Inbound Call and Marketing Campaign Data report:

1. As digital behaviors increase, so does the drive for human interaction

As a society, we’ve grown quite accustomed to the phrase “just do it online.” However, our research demonstrated that consumers are embracing longer offline conversations to learn about and purchase products or services:

Average Call Time in January 2016 = 119 seconds

Average Call Time in January 2017 = 254 seconds

Increase in 2016 to 2017 Call Times = 113%

Of course, plenty of successful sales activity now takes place via LinkedIn. The ability to reach you with questions through social media or email are great options to offer.

These stats, however, indicate that it remains your responsibility to be available for calls with prospects who prefer this method of interaction.

Guaranteeing that consumers know they can connect with you this way for a few minutes, and taking time to perfect your phone pitch, will allow you to benefit from the estimated 162 billion calls that will be placed to businesses by 2019.

Key Takeaway #1

Your phone number must be prominently featured within all of your marketing efforts, including digital methods such as social media, online profiles, ad campaigns, and email campaigns, as the ability to reach you this way becomes an immediate selling point to consumers who still desire person-to-person communications. Do not rely on email or contact forms alone; consumers are craving interaction.  

2. Conversions Mean Everything

The success of an inbound call campaign is ultimately determined by conversions, and certain sectors typically enjoy very high rates:

• Top 3 Industries with Most Conversions in 2016

General Legal    58%

Doctors              42%

Student Loans   35%

• Top 3 Industries with Most Conversions in 2017

Real Estate Lawyer          55%

Life Insurance                 51%

Bankruptcy Lawyer         51%

That doesn’t mean you’re in the wrong business if you don’t see your industry on this list. Rather, it indicates that it might be time to evaluate how you are handling incoming inquiries.

In general, sales calls have a 30-50% conversion rate, so if you’re not seeing that level of success, it may be time to work towards a deeper understanding of your consumers’ needs.

Key Takeaway #2

If your calls aren’t closing, you should consider recording technology or even outside analytics services as a means to assess what isn’t working. By taking a step back and evaluating the effectiveness of your current pitch, you can optimize your talking points to increase your conversions. Follow the best practices of the above industries by sampling their processes to discern how their value statement tends to be as compelling as the data showcases.

Recommended Read: 6 Elements of Winning Sales Conversations

3. Seasonality Plays a Role

Certainly, every sales professional knows what time of year constitutes their “busy season,” but our findings may be contrarian to that understanding. Through our research, we found that the length of consumer phone calls fluctuates based on season, with the greatest increase occurring between winter and spring:

Average Call Time During Q1 in 2016 = 107 seconds

Average Call Time During Q2 in 2016 = 162 seconds

Call Time Increase from Q1 to Q2 = 51%

This suggests that as consumers finish paying off their holiday expenses, they become willing to spend more time on the phone learning about products and services they are interested in.

If you are looking to increase inbound calls as part of your sales strategy, it may serve you well to incorporate this trend into the timing of your marketing efforts. Unless your business is based on offerings most likely to be sought out in Q1, perhaps hold off on any major push until Q2.

Key Takeaway #3

Analyze your own sales numbers to really understand how seasonality affects your business. We now live in a data-driven world, and by taking a closer look at the timing of your highest conversions rates, you may discover specific patterns that you can capitalize on moving forward. Across your own sales calls you should be tracking, day, season, time, and result to better optimize all activity and powerfully leverage unique differences in seasonality.

With $1 trillion in consumer spending estimated to be influenced by calls placed to businesses, phone conversations with customers are still very much a part of the sales funnel. As the consumer experience becomes more digital every day, it is imperative to your success that you continue to connect with prospects who prefer this more traditional form of communication.

RingPartner’s full 2017 Inbound Call and Marketing Campaign Data report can be downloaded here.

The post Are Inbound Sales Calls Still Relevant? Here’s What The Data Says. appeared first on Sales Hacker.

By Craig Torres

Vik Singh’s company has powerful artificial intelligence software that helps firms hunt down the best sales leads. Getting somebody to use it — well, that’s a story that says a lot about the U.S. expansion.

U.S. businesses have every incentive to adopt labour-saving technologies, replacing factory workers with robots and desk jobs with smart software. In some areas, such as finance, machine decision-making is advancing quickly. In others, there are obstacles. Overall, while the penetration of automation in the economy is happening, it is taking place at a slower pace than futurists expected.

Singh tells customers how his system can help trim sales prospecting staff and boost revenue. Managers are intrigued but sometimes reluctant to entrust a high-touch business such as sales to a black box.

“They just don’t understand it,” says the co-founder and chief executive officer of Infer Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. “And they don’t believe it.”

Hundreds of companies are trying to disrupt the way we consume, work or move. The economy’s growth potential could be higher if smart machines could turbocharge how humans go about their tasks. Higher productivity, or output per hour, would boost corporate profits and may help U.S. workers finally get a pay raise.

That economic nirvana just isn’t happening yet.

Productivity in the U.S. rose only 1.1 per cent last year and rather than being replaced by technology, more workers are being hired. Employers have added an average 159,000 new jobs a month so far in this expansion, compared with 99,000 in the previous upswing. Over the same period, investment in intellectual property products, such as software, has barely edged up as a share of GDP versus the last cycle.

“Low labour productivity is the biggest problem with the story that I tell,” said Andrew McAfee, co-director at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of The Second Machine Age, a book about the next wave of technology. “Some of these pretty profound innovations are going to take time to diffuse.”

There isn’t a single story that explains why second-wave technologies are trickling rather than flooding into the economy. Bloomberg News spoke with several to find out how the pace of technological adoption is proceeding. Here are some of the themes that emerged:

• Robots can handle highly repetitive tasks in manufacturing, but at BMW’s largest plant in the world, located in Spartanburg, S.C., the talk is about complexity and customization — tasks that need human input.
• Extracting data from highly automated manufacturing operations is harder than it sounds, executives from Cisco Systems Inc. say.
• Finally, when it comes to turning any critical operation over to a computer, there is this one big sticking point: trust.

Here are some of their stories.

Social Tables helps companies with event space sell it to planners who need it, while also providing collaborative tools. The Washington-based company started using Infer about three years ago after launching a mobile app that gave it about 12,000 new sales leads.The event space and planning market is large and varied. Sorting through those leads to find potential subscribers would have been a gigantic human task, said Trevor Lynn, the chief marketing officer. The company also turns up about 3,000 new leads a month.

Social Tables had a couple of choices: Hire an expensive database engineer or many more salespeople to sift the data. Instead, they use Infer, which sorts, queries and offers up live feedback on how the leads are performing. This kind of big-data hunting and vision would be difficult for any human to replicate in real time.

“We don’t need as many lead-qualification folks,” Lynn said. While Social Tables didn’t replace anybody with Infer’s software, “it definitely shapes your hiring map in the future.”

Social Tables is the typical Infer customer — a young, fast-adapting company that is looking for ways to use technology to save money and move quickly. “One less person means more decisions in a rapid manner,” Lynn said.

Getting more-established companies to use the software is challenging, said Singh, who previously worked at Alphabet’s Google. About 25 per cent of Infer’s customers have been around 10 years or more.

“The biggest bottleneck to machine learning is trust,” he said. As a result, finding the “hero CEO” who will tell their shareholders they are trimming a sales team to rely on a black box is difficult. “If we can create these technologies that build trust, I am very confident we will be able to leverage that in a new way,” said Singh.

From baggage carousels to shifting stages at a rock concert, a motor made by SEW-Eurodrive Inc. is probably the workhorse making things move.

Some of the most efficient manufacturing of precision casing and gearing this German company produces happens in a bustling plant on Old Spartanburg Highway in Lyman, S.C. Eighty per cent of the plant’s production is exported.

In 2000, there were no robots on the factory floor. Now there is one robot for every human, most made by Japan’s Fanuc Corp.

The infusion of automation into the plant didn’t push out a single worker. Robots added scale. The plant will produce 500,000 components this year, up from 78,000 in 1999. Total staff is up just six per cent to 148 people.

The plant is so lean that the humans are having a difficult time keeping track of all that the robots need and do. Call it a robot saturation point.

The next big boost in productivity is likely to come from an unexpected place — digital information, managers here said.

SEW Eurodrive is looking for a system to feed data from its production machinery into a computer dashboard that gives operators a real-time look at plant performance rather than scurrying around with clipboards.

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“If we can make that product a little faster without jeopardizing quality or safety, then we win,” said Melvin Story, a supervisor at the plant.

If a robot is having trouble with a line of components, a human can be on the problem faster. If there is a maintenance program coming up, they can do it on time before something fails.

Melding big data with manufacturing is the next step for hundreds of companies, and it is challenging, said Bryan Tantzen, head of manufacturing and industry solutions at Cisco, the networking-technology giant.

“You have to connect these machines to transform them,” he says. There are obstacles. Not all machines are loaded with sensors. Information-technology staff can be different from operational-technology staff. People responsible for robotics can view networks as insecure and unreliable.

“That OT/IT divide is a huge barrier to adoption,” Tantzen said, and the infusion of new technology into manufacturing has slowed in recent years, partly due to cost-cutting.

Eventually, big data will be a reality on the plant floor, he said, because there is a constant need to push up profits and productivity. “I think it is really about to hit an inflection point and accelerate, and therefore drive productivity.”

BMW‘s Spartanburg plant — sprawling over six million square feet — is the highly automated carmaker that technologists talk about.

The hype around robotics suggests a world in which humans have little input in manufacturing. Talk to BMW managers, however, and it’s all about getting the right mix of humans and machines in a world where customization and complexity are big challenges.

Almost every one of the 1,400 X-series SUVs rolling off the line here each day has been custom ordered by somebody. While about 1,600 robots weld, drill and paint auto bodies in steel cages, farther down the line the cars are surrounded by humans adding this audio system or that trim. Humans are paying close attention to look, feel, smell and even the sound of these cars to ensure BMW authenticity.

“You can build cars for months and months, and never build the same car twice,” says Steve Wilson, a spokesman for BMW Spartanburg.

If there is one lesson from the team here, it’s that robots move processes while humans improve them, according to Richard Morris, vice-president of product integration, who has been with BMW in Spartanburg since 1993. Morris says technology is good for “transactional jobs.” He adds: “There is something that we call transformation and that is something only a human can do.”

“When you put automation out there, you are just living in the status quo, but with people you are constantly improving the process,” Morris added. “Sometimes it is better to start with people.”

 

You’ve heard it before. “Marketing doesn’t get it. I need leads, not messaging.” Or, “The marketing guys don’t do anything for me. If they would just give me their budget, I could hire 15 more salespeople and make the number.” Revenue

Buyers today expect engaging and personal brand experiences throughout their relationship with a company. They are used to connecting on social media, getting replies to tweets, having immediate access to customer service chats, and more—all in an instant.

Your outbound marketing campaigns have to keep up.

Consistently engaging leads and customers to stay relevant and build interest is critical, but having one-on-one conversations with every member of your audience is very difficult to scale. That’s where drip marketing comes in. An effective drip marketing strategy can nurture leads, drive conversions, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and make life easier for everyone—from your audience to sales to your marketing team.

What is Drip Marketing?

Drip marketing is an automated communication strategy that delivers targeted content to prospective, current, and past customers over a period of time to nurture brand relationships and generate sales. Communications may span email, social media, mobile, and other channels.

A drip marketing campaign is usually triggered by an action the user takes—filling out a form, downloading content, making a purchase, etc. Content is strategically chosen to help guide prospects through the buyer’s journey, and the prospect’s response to those messages dictates which stream of communications she receives.

How to Start a Drip Marketing Campaign

Drip marketing campaigns are personalized, targeted, and highly strategic. The first thing you need to do is identify your targets and goals. Do you want to nurture prospective customers to purchase your product or service? Do you want to maintain a relationship with new customers so they become repeat customers? Do you want to respond to needs they may have based on their behavior on your website? Or maybe it’s all of the above.

Write down the scenarios where you think a drip communication could offer value. The scenarios might include:

• Inactivity: If a subscriber isn’t opening emails, browsing your website, or downloading your content, a drip campaign might include reminders and special offers to encourage follow-through.
• Purchase: After a purchase, a follow-up drip campaign might offer educational content for increased adoption or cross-sell/upsell offers for add-ons or upgrades.
• Inquiries: If a prospect asks a question, fills out a contact form, signs up for notifications, or downloads an app, a drip campaign might offer relevant additional information, encourage next steps, etc.

Drip messages differ from other communications such as email newsletters because they’re more personal and direct. When you create a typical drip communication, it should feel personal because it is relevant to the specific activities and content they have consumed in contrast to the more generic feel of most newsletters.

Choosing Content for Drip Marketing Messages

Effective drip marketing is not just about getting your brand in front of an audience over and over again. Drip marketing should move decision-makers through the buyer’s journey and turn customers into brand advocates. Each message delivers the content your audience needs, when they need it—moving them to the next stage in their journeys.

A stream of content for a new lead or contact—one who hasn’t indicated any specific interest or need—might look like this:

• Top-of-Funnel Content—Start by delivering ungated, easy-to-consume content that addresses the prospect’s pain point or helps him diagnose the solution to his problem.
• Mid-funnel Content—After a few introductory content pieces, or after the prospect indicates interest by clicking or filling out a form, try presenting more detailed and strategic content. Give the user “How to” articles and some gated ebooks or webinars.
• Bottom-of-Funnel Content—If the prospect downloads content and follows through on your calls-to-action, the content stream should switch to more sales-oriented content. Start providing them with case studies, third-party reports that compare your company to competitors, price charts, etc.

Consumer drip campaigns differ from B2B campaigns because the goals are usually simpler and shorter-term. Where B2B campaigns are trying to nurture leads to close deals on business purchases that require larger purchasing team decisions, more responsibility for ROI, etc., consumer campaigns, specifically retail, are usually selling a small number of low-investment products.

A shorter, consumer-oriented drip campaign, then, is usually much simpler. If a customer abandons a shopping cart, for example, you might send one or two reminders, followed by a testimonial or review from another customer, followed by a discount offer or coupon code to seal the deal. One caveat, for large consumer purchases, like a car or a life insurance policy, a long-term nurture may make more sense as the consumer takes longer to consider the purchase.

Choosing which content include in your drip campaign messages assumes two previous actions have been taken:

1. You have the customer lifecycle clearly outlined and understand your prospects’ needs and pain points along the way.
2. You have a library of content that answers the questions your audience is asking at every point in their purchase decision process. (If not, it’s time to start creating and repurposing content to meet this need.)

Conversion points and streams of strategic content assets are the foundations of an effective drip campaign, but the details can make or break drip campaigns. As you get ready to launch, make sure you’re not making any of these common drip campaign mistakes:

1. Generic Messages

The purpose of a drip campaign is to nurture relationships, so no bland, boilerplate messages. Each communication should speak directly to the user as an individual in a specific point of his or her purchasing decision. Make sure each message is tied to a buyer’s journey and a piece of strategic content. Also, don’t be afraid to get personal! If you can, call out past actions like a previous asset download or page visit so that it shows that you actually know them. All of this can be done at scale if you use personalized tokens.

2. Sender is Vague or Inauthentic

Oh, look! You just got an email. But wait, it seems sketchy. It’s from John at reply-to@company.com. How could it be from John if I can’t even email him back? Both a company without a name and a name without a company can put off potential customers in their inboxes. Instead, combine the first name with the company or department name. The message will feel personal, but won’t make them feel like you’re trying to dupe them into thinking it’s a non-business email. After all, you are trying to drive revenue!

3. Unsegmented Audiences

Thinking your entire audience is at the same buying stage would be as silly as everyone in the world going to the DMV at the same time. People have different needs at different stages, so it doesn’t make sense to lump them all together in your marketing efforts. Your entire audience is not in the same stage of the purchasing decision, does not work in the same industry, does not have the same authority at his/her company, etc. The more specific your audience segments, the more personal and impactful your messages will be.

Start by segmenting your audience according to their role on the purchasing team. If your content and drip strategy is tied to buyer personas, this puts each persona on a specific track. Then, decide where each lead can be found in his/her journey. This might be determined by actions they have taken on the site, or conversations they have had with sales. A good engagement platform will let you score leads to keep track of where they are in their buyer journeys.

4. Ignoring the Metrics

Setting up a proper drip campaign can take an investment of time and effort up-front, but that doesn’t mean it’s fool-proof or that it doesn’t need to be monitored. Too many marketers are eager to finally release their drip programs and fail to follow-up with the metrics and analytics. No matter how carefully you set it up, it’s never perfect the first time. Monitor, measure, test, and tweak.

Opens and click-throughs are two key metrics to monitor throughout the buyer journey. Since the emails themselves are targeted to personas and stages in the journey, opens and clicks will always tell you if your messaging is hitting home. If a message gets lower than average metrics, reconsider where it belongs in the drip strategy or if it even belongs at all. If a prospect starts disengaging, reconsider where he is in the journey.

5. Boring Subject Lines

Don’t start creating click-bait, but do make sure your subject/headline is compelling enough to make people want to open an email. Focus on the value you’re offering to the subscriber, instead of the features of a product or service. Try including emoji, special characters, or other text options to stand out in a crowded inbox. Use powerful adjectives and start with a verb. People also really love lists and numbers. And make sure, again, that you’re A/B testing subject lines and learning what works.

Everyone Wins with a Good Drip Marketing Strategy

An effective drip marketing strategy is a substantial investment to set up, but once it’s in place, the results are inspiring. Your audience will be much happier to receive relevant messaging instead of batch-and-blast emails that mean nothing to them. Your sales team will appreciate more qualified leads. Your marketing team will have more time for other tasks as your automated program nurtures leads and keeps them connected with your brand.

If you don’t have personas, buyer journeys, sales funnels, and content outlined and put together, start there. You will need those insights and tools to create a truly effective campaign. Then, make sure your existing program can facilitate the kind of automation required. Once your drip campaign is up and running, you’ll start seeing the benefits very quickly.

The post 5 Common Mistakes that Destroy a Drip Campaign appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

We all have our off days. That’s a given. But a string of days with low motivation can do more than just put us in a slump. It can seriously impact our sales targets and cause unnecessary stress and anxiety.

So when you start to feel yourself sliding down that path, it’s a good idea to look at people who’ve been there and made it to the other side and see how they did it.

These quotes aren’t a replacement for hard work, but rather snackable pieces of actionable inspiration to put you back on track when you lose motivation.

And because we believe progress is measured in action, we paired each one with a specific action item you can take today to boost your productivity, give you a virtual high-five when you’re feeling low, and create real results for your business.

Crush your day with Steli's free daily sales motivation videos. Sign up now!

1. "Don’t try to be a man of success, try to be a man of value." - Albert Einstein

What it means:

There’s a reason people react so negatively when they feel a salesperson is being too ‘sales-y’. A successful sale doesn’t talk about you, but rather what you can do for your potential client. How do you add value to their lives? How is working with you going to transform them? There’s more to what we do as salespeople than just the numbers.

Action you can take today:

Instead of obsessing over stats, become a great storyteller. Show your prospects the story of their lives before, during, and after they become your client and the transformative value that you’re adding. Nail down this value story before jumping on your next call and become a ‘man of value’.

2. "You can't turn a no to a yes without a maybe in between." - Francis Underwood

What it means:

The path to a sale is never A to B. There’s a whole alphabet between your first conversation and the close. Don’t get discouraged when you hit a wall asking for the close. Think how that ‘maybe’ is really just a ‘yes’ in disguise.

Action you can take today:

Create a list of common concerns that cause your prospects to answer with a ‘maybe’ and why those concerns are unfounded. Knowing these and being able to explain them simply, clearly, and confidently will help you keep the conversation moving on the path to a yes. ‘Maybe’ is where great salespeople live. They know that anything other than a flat out ‘no’ is a step towards a yes.

3. "You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle

What it means:

How you choose to live your days is how you choose to live your life. Are you willing to put in the time every day to reach the level of success you truly want? Are you willing to miss that dinner or not go out for drinks because you’re working towards something bigger? These are the choices that define who you are and how successful you’ll be as a salesperson.

Action you can take today:

Focus on habits, not goals. Frame your day around incentivizing and rewarding yourself for repeating a habit, like making your 40 calls for the day, instead of putting a daily dollar amount on a pedestal. Create a repeatable process for yourself which you know will get you where you want and that you can do every single day without fail. This way, you’re focusing on actions you control rather than putting all the pressure on results that might not come.

4. "You just can't beat the person who never gives up." - Babe Ruth

What it means:

Simply put, success comes to those who refuse to quit. A little less simply put, behavioral economists studying human motivation discovered something called Time Inconsistency—which is the brain’s tendency to value immediate rewards more highly than future rewards. Unfortunately, selling is less about winning every little skirmish and more about winning the war. This means pushing through down days, forcing yourself to do the work even when you aren’t ‘feeling it’, and never, ever giving up.

Action you can take today:

Take a step back and look at the bigger picture of your sales strategy. It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day of sales and lose sight of where you want yourself to be in a month, a year, hell, even 10 years. Commit to the long-term vision of what you want to achieve and never give up. Use that vision of future you to inspire you along the way when life gets you down.

5. "Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action." - Walter Anderson

What it means:

We’re all procrastinators at some point. But ironically, the guilt and frustration we feel from not starting is often worse than the pain of actually doing work. The anxiety we feel when faced with a huge list of prospects or massive sales goals can seem insurmountable, but something amazing happens once we actually start working: The fear goes away and the to-do list all of a sudden seems more doable.

Action you can take today:

List the one thing you can do right now, no matter how small, that will help you move forward. Is it as simple as making that first call? Or replying to an email? Try to get even more specific. Instead of saying, “I’ll call 5 prospects on Wednesday,” say, “I’ll call 5 prospects on Wednesday between 10–11am.” Break down bigger tasks into small items you can easily get started on and watch your motivation skyrocket.  

6. "Success is never owned; it is only rented—and the rent is due every day." - Rory Vaden

What it means:

In sales (and in life) there’s never a good time to rest on your past achievements. The success you have today came from what you did yesterday. And if you sit back and stop doing what got you here, it’ll go away just as quickly as it came. You owe it to yourself and your business to put in the work every single day and keep paying your dues.

Action you can take today:

What’s the rent that you paid in the past that allows you to live in the success of your present? Was it dedication? Was it taking risks? Was it constant education and personal growth? Whatever it was, start your day by making a big payment in that rent. Recognize the skills and qualities that got you where you are today and repeat them daily. Write them down and make sure you set aside time for them every single day.

7. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee

What it means:

What’s more important: To be a jack of all trades or a master of one? There will always be some new tool, task, or other distraction that wants to take your attention away today. But every second spent on an unimportant task is a second taken away from working towards mastery. Focus is our greatest asset on the path to success.

Action you can take today:

What’s your ‘one kick’? What skill or technique, if mastered, would bring you the biggest level of success? Take a moment and think about what you put your energy into every day and whether or not you’re working on the right skills. In the past, I’ve gone so far as to set a reminder every few hours to ask me if I’m working on the right thing at this moment or if I’ve been distracted again. Make yourself a force to be reckoned with.

8. "Pressure is a privilege." - Billie Jean King

What it means:

Feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders? Guess what, that’s a good thing. Being pressured means you’re in a position where the actions you take matter. You’ve set goals that are challenging. You’re motivated to be better than you are today. Pressure is just a byproduct of your own success.

Action you can take today:

Create a ‘small wins scrapbook’—a collection of recent successes that you can look back on to remind yourself just how far you’ve come and why you’re feeling pressured to do more today. It’s all too easy to just move on after hitting a goal or making a sale without taking the time to appreciate the work you’ve done. Take that time to celebrate the small wins and value what you do every single day.

9. "Change before you have to." - Jack Welch

What it means:

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, the best you’ll get is what you already have. Unfortunately, the human brain is hardwired to take the path of least resistance, which more often than not means sticking to business as usual, even when you know that changing now will help you in the future.

Action you can take today:

Write down the one thing in your heart you know you need to change to make your life and your career better in the future. This might be something you’ve known for a long time but haven’t felt the need to act on because there’s not enough pressure in your environment to make you feel like you have to. Now, tell yourself this one thing is going to destroy your career. Every day, look at that one thing and ask yourself ‘Do I really want to wait until I have to do this? Or do I want to be the person I want to be on my own terms?’

10. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein

What it means:

It takes a deep understanding to be able to create something simple. Think of Steve Jobs, who famously made Apple engineers make every function on the original iPod accessible in 3 clicks, just because he knew that simplicity was the key to massive sales. I think it worked out pretty well for him.

Action you can take today:

Test your pitch’s ‘simple factor’ by taking it outside your bubble. Call up your parents or partner or even a friend in a totally different profession and try it out on them. Do they know what you’re talking about? Can you answer questions that come up that you might think are ‘obvious’? Can you make it as simple as possible?

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11. "Everything we want is on the other side of fear." - George Addair

What it means:

Fear is a sign that you’re on the right path. Trying new things, taking risks, and going after the unknown are all scary experiences. They’re also exactly what we need to do when we want to grow. We can’t let something as harmless as a little fear stand between us and what we want.

Action you can take today:

Write down your biggest fears that you face every single day and imagine each one going to its extreme conclusion. Are you afraid of a large prospect turning you down? Take it one step further and imagine them yelling at you. Or calling your boss to complain. Or egging your house in the middle of the night. Imaging an extreme outcome to our fears lets us realize just how inconsequential they really are and helps us power through them.

12. "There is no such thing as failure. There are only results." - Tony Robbins

What it means:

No matter what you do, the fact that you did something is more important than the outcome. Every action helps us move forward, whether it shows us the right way to act, or even just clarifies what we shouldn’t be doing. The only real failure is in not acting.

Action you can take today:

Change your perspective around what you see as ‘failure’ by realizing that each one has helped you in some way. Start by listing out your past 5 ‘failures’. Now write down what you learned from each one. Did a prospect turn you down because you messed up your pitch? Maybe you learned that you need to do more prep before a call or rewrite a section of your script. It might be painful to revisit those experiences at first, but as you become more comfortable spending time in your own ‘failures’ you’ll start to realize that they are just stepping stones on the path to personal success.

13. "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

What it means:

Salespeople face more negativity than almost any other profession (just be thankful you’re not a politician!) and it’s all too easy to let that negativity make us think that we should just conform to what other people are doing. But the problem is that by emulating others, the best we can ever be is Number Two. To be truly great, you need to be yourself.

Action you can take today:

Don’t focus on the negatives. Make a list of the moments when your unique selling style worked or times when you went with your gut and came out with the win. Remember there are so many factors in the selling process that are out of your control and that a ‘no’ doesn’t necessarily mean you did anything wrong. Stick with the positives and aim for that top spot.

14. "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life." - Jean Luc Picard

What it means:

No matter how hard you prepare, how well you pitch, or how much work you put in, sometimes it’s just not your day. That’s it. Life can be chaotic and trying to rationalize every little event will drive you crazy.

Action you can take today:

Separate yourself from your losses. The next time you get a no, instead of analyzing what you did to lose the sale, look at it from a few different angles. Was there something going on in your prospect’s business that made them not want to buy? Or are there changes happening in the market? The key is to look at the bigger picture. As personal development guru Zig Ziglar puts it: “Failure is an event, not a person.”

15. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln

What it means:

Productivity is about more than time spent working. It’s not about just doing, but doing the right things in the best ways possible. Why do more work when you can get the same results in less time?

Action you can take today:

Spend the time now to save you exponentially more time in the future. Does that mean hiring someone else to find your leads or implementing a new CMS that will let you work better and faster with every future client? Before you dive into your next task, think of how you can sharpen your own axe.

16. "Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth." - Mike Tyson

What it means:

Don’t get in the ring with Tyson! Seriously though, the champ’s fists are the perfect metaphor for a problem so many of us fall into: over preparation. We believe that just because we have plans or we’ve prepped in advance that things can’t go wrong. But the thing about a ‘plan’ is that it’s really just another name for a guess.

Action you can take today:

Plan for the unexpected by setting up systems so that no matter what comes your way, you’ve got something to fall back on. What’s a system? Simply put, it’s the backbone of your sales plan that can guide you back onto the right path when things fall apart. Client angry with you? Have a system in place for discounts that you can offer on the spot. Call with a prospect go worse than expected? Have a system of follow ups in place to smooth things over and push them back towards the close.

17. "Losers focus on winners and winners focus on winning."

What it means:

Haters gonna hate but those who achieve real success only focus on themselves. Chasing someone else or obsessing over what they did can blind you from focusing on the most important person of all: yourself.

Action you can take today:

Stop the hate. When you start comparing yourself to others, take the emotional context out of the equation, put your ego aside, and turn those feelings of inadequacy or jealousy into a positive learning experience. What can you learn from that person that can help increase your own productivity or make you more successful? The best revenge is to be a better version of yourself.

18. "If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward." - Martin Luther King Jr.

What it means:

The smallest step will get you that much closer to your final destination. We create our own path to success one step at a time, and even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, moving in just about any direction (except backwards!) is all it takes to get closer to our goals.

Action you can take today:

Find your momentum tipping point. There’s a mental process called the Zeigarnik Effect, which kicks in when you are close to finishing a task, propelling you towards the finish line like you’re running from a hoard of zombies. What is it that pushes you towards the finish line? Hemingway would always stop writing mid-sentence so that when he returned to work the next day he knew where to start, effectively forcing himself into ‘must finish’ mode.

19. "When people give me all these great compliments, I thank them, but still go back to my room and practice." - B.B. King

What it means:

Extrinsic motivation like praise and monetary success should always be secondary to intrinsic motivation. What is it about what you’re doing that truly drives you to keep at it every single day? When the praise fades or the sales dry up, what is it that will keep you going?

Action you can take today:

Find your core motivator. Write a list of the things that motivate you to keep at it every single day. Is it the money? Pride? Personal growth? Praise from your team or boss? Be honest. Now categorize them by extrinsic and intrinsic and rank how important each one is to you. This should give you a great tool to return to any time you feel your motivation waning and need a reminder of why you’re putting in the hustle.

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Motivation is a well that unfortunately runs dry sometimes. But with a few simple exercises and some changes in perspective, we can fill it back up. Use these quotes and action items as a guide to put you back on the path to success and start seeing real results again.

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It seems we’ve become consumed by volume! Just look at the so many of the blog posts are articles.

We are exhorted to “live life at 1000 dials per day,” conduct social selling at “scale,” “tweet your way to 1000’s of followers,” “How to get 10,000 Facebook fans,” “How to get 10,000 LinkedIn connections relevant to your business,” “How I got 1,000,000 followers on LinkedIn,” “How to send 40,000 emails a day,” “What we learned from 1000 cold emails,” “Cold calling 100 prospects a day,” “How to generate 1000’s of leads.”

I’ll stop here, there are literally…….. well, 1000’s of these types of articles (I suppose volume begets volume.)

Our managers are always saying “More,” more leads, more calls, more emails, more content, more deals in the pipeline, more of everything. If we don’t have enough of whatever management says we need, we simply do more, we cast a wider net.

The problem is volume doesn’t seem to be working.

The majority of sales organizations seem to be opportunity starved, their natural plea is more.

So we do more…….

More is easy, it’s virtually free. Just send out another 10,000 emails – the incremental cost is virtually zero, perhaps we have to buy a list. Just ramp up your followers (you can pay a few $’s and get 1000 new twitter followers). LinkedIn reinforces this, with a single click I can send connection requests to 100’s of people…..clearly they think more is better (It’s a long way from their warnings, “Connect with people you know.”)

We spend $ billions on 1000’s of sales and marketing automation tools—most focused on giving us more.

The digitization of our businesses seems to make more the default solution to all of our sales and marketing challenges.

But more isn’t working. Each iteration of more, produces proportionately less. We see declining open/click throughs, declining response rates, declining phone pick ups.

More is mindlessness….

What if we eliminated increasing the volume as the “answer?” How might we rethink our approaches, rethink our prospecting, marketing, and sales strategies?

How would we change what we do and how we engage of there was a limitation to who we could reach? I don’t know what your number is. If it’s 1000, 10,000, 100,000. What if that were the limit to the volume that we could drive?

What would we change to get the engagement we need, to produce the results we seek?

Our prospects and customers are already telling us that more simply doesn’t work. They are ignoring our calls, they are ignoring/Spamming our emails, they are immune to our social outreach. They are increasingly impatient and unaccepting of our race to capture their attention. They are overwhelmed and shutting down.

So more is clearly not the answer. Volume has its limitations and rapidly declining returns.

So what are you going to do differently, any idiot can do more. I trust you don’t fall into that category (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.)