Amazon has been granted a patent designed to stop you from visiting a shop to buy something, but then looking for a cheaper version online while you're there.

The patent, which we first saw via The Verge, would essentially try and intercept you if you made a price comparison search using the shop's WiFi. It outlines a way that a retailer could intercept and analyse a network request, like a search term or URL.

If the retailer works out that you're probably looking at a competitor's site, it can try and persuade you back with a store coupon, show you that the item's immediately available in-store, or offer a discounted version of the item.

Retailers call this trend of looking at a product in-person and buying it online "showrooming", and it's something that's been worrying them for a while.

As Amazon puts it in its patent: "[A] negative scenario may exist for a physical store retailer when a consumer evaluates items at the physical store, leverages physical store sales representatives, and then reviews pricing information online in order to purchase the same item from an online retailer.

"The physical store retailer pays for floor space, sales representative time, product inventory management, and other costs while not being able to complete a sales transaction." 

On the face of it, this anti-showrooming patent looks like a strange move from Amazon, given it's the main beneficiary of this trend.

And Amazon also doesn't have that many physical itself — so why would it worry about price comparisons with competitors?

It's instead more likely that the patent is a defensive move against retailers. Now, retailers can't take measures to stop you from logging into their WiFi and looking for their products more cheaply online on Amazon.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Can you believe it’s almost June 30th and the end of Q2? I feel like the first part of the year has just flown by!

Now that it’s summer, it’s time for barbecues, parties, and events — all perfect opportunities for networking and especially if you’re an entrepreneur (because let’s be honest, we entrepreneurs never really turn off our business brains)! I’ve been attending so many events and at the last one, a conversation got started about how great these events were for building relationships. That reminded me of an article I was interviewed for in Entrepreneur Magazine several years ago about how entrepreneurs and business leaders can build their networks, especially in the early days.  I hope these ideas provide some help to you as we launch into our summer networking and you launch or grow your business.

1. Start early

Start building your network when you start building your product. While it’s important to create your product or service and to continuously improve it, don’t forget that you need people to buy the result! Sometimes entrepreneurs can focus too much on making something people want and forget to make personal connections. If you focus on just the product, you’re missing the opportunity to start building your network. These relationships will be critical as you grow.

2. Make a list

The first step to building your network is to make a list of the kinds of people you will need to get your product to the market. Will you need contacts in manufacturing, financing, or marketing? What type of prospects will you be looking for? Start brainstorming and write down your ideas. These will become your launching point to build your list. It’s never too late to do this.

3. Take advantage of available resources

When you first start your entrepreneurial journey, you may feel as if money is just flying out of your wallet. Networking can help you find resources. The bigger your network is the easier it will be to find board members, mentors, investors, employees and other needed resources. Being well networked will lead you to know about free resources for entrepreneurs in the early stages of product and business development. I recommend visiting your local SCORE branch. SCORE is a nonprofit association that provides mentoring, tools, and workshops to help new and mature businesses thrive. Find a local branch near you here: score.org.

4. Do your homework

There’s one thing even the richest CEO can’t buy more of: time. When you’re starting a business, your time is your most valuable asset, so make sure you’re using it wisely when you network. Before you start connecting willy-nilly, do some research on people you want to reach out to and make sure there is mutual benefit. For example, if you’re starting a business in the tech industry, don’t waste your time networking to people who only invest in food startups. Go back to the list you made and look for people who can either fill the roles you need or who can introduce you to someone who can. If you accidentally connect with the wrong source, ask if he or she can refer you to someone else. This is true even if you have been in business for years.

5. Make a real connection

My definition of networking is connecting. I want my network to be made of people who know me, like me and trust me because that is the only useful network. If you want to build a network like that, start by staying connected to and nurturing those you know and then asking them for introductions to the people you want to connect with. You can ask for these introductions online or in person. However, when you connect, make sure you focus on creating a genuine relationship. Let them know a little bit about you. Bring some value into their life before asking for anything or selling.

If you need help building your network, I can help you develop strategies that will work for you and your business. Call me at 775-852-5020 or schedule an appointment and I’ll share some ideas.

The post 5 Kick Ass Ways an Entrepreneur can get Results from Networking appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Some companies have several inside departments to take in, qualify, nurture, and filter sales leads to such a finite extent that few leads go to anyone. If the raw lead count is high but there is a mere trickle going to the salespeople, you have a substantial problem. You are:

• Delaying talking to buyers and reducing your chances of making the sale by 50%, because salespeople, on average, aren’t getting the leads until weeks after they’re created.
• Filtering out real buyers.
• Paying nurturing and qualification departments that drain budget and add little value.
• Driving your salespeople to create their own leads, sucking away productive selling time.
• Starving the pipeline of new prospects.
• Substantially reducing current and future revenue.

A 100% True Story

I was hired by a high tech company in San Jose to find sales leakage because of a substantial sales slump. One finding stood out: 85% to 90% of all inquiries and leads were in a qualification and nurture process that was out of control. The lead generation team was doing its job, but the rules for a qualified lead were so onerous that very little was going to the salespeople. 

The sales department was not making its numbers and everyone was frustrated. It turns out there were several stages of qualification, from two different inside telemarketing departments. 

The qualification department called every inquiry and filtered out those that were not immediate buyers and passed the inquiries to the nurture department. Their favorite script was: Are you ready to buy yet?

It took weeks to get through to inquirers; there were eight attempts before inquirers were declared dead. All inquiries (even hot leads) were then passed along to the nurture department. 

The rules required that each inquiry needed a time frame for purchase, a decision maker, and a budget. Those inquiries with immediate need were passed along to Sales.  Those that were not ready to buy within the following 60 days were kept in the nurture process. 

The nurture department didn’t let anything progress to Sales that wasn’t 100% qualified to buy; a small trickle of leads went to Sales. From my estimate 85% to 90% of the buyers were filtered out. The department manager said something like: “We only give our salespeople 100% qualified leads that will buy.” The issue is that the inside telequalification department wasn’t aware of the Universal Buyers Law.  

Universal Buyers Law: I will lie until I am ready to buy!

         “Prospects have a common trait; they lie. They say they aren’t going to buy right away, they have no budget and they are not the decision maker. They are lying.”  

In all, there were about 40 inside people in two departments working on the qualification and nurture process. This cost the company $1.2 million in salary and benefits. A consultant once taught me that any good trait taken to an extreme can become a negative. When I reported on the log jam, I thought the sales manager was going to have a heart attack on the spot. What started off with the good intentions of not wasting a salesperson’s time on unqualified leads resulted in huge negative consequences.

The End Result

Two departments were consolidated into one smaller department. Twenty percent of the savings obtained from cutting the two departments went to an outside qualification service tied into the CRM system. Lead flow jumped by 300% to 400% in four weeks. 

• ‘Immediate-need’ leads were hot transferred by telephone to a rep.
• Appointments were created 5% to 10% of the time (one week in advance for the representative).
• Qualification criteria were loosened.
• Long-term buyers (over six months) were placed in a nurture cycle.
• The pipeline jumped in value by 50%.
• Revenue increased substantially in three to four months.

“The company broke the logjam of do-gooders, all trying to justify their jobs with archaic, well-intentioned but stupid rules that prevented getting leads to the field and into the hands of someone who could sell.”

What to Do If This Sounds Like You

Check the inquiry backlog at each step of the qualification process. Is there a log jam effecting revenue and pipeline growth? Are the qualification rules too strict? 

Qualification should be fast. Nurturing should be consistent and just as brutal; when someone says they have no need and aren’t going to buy, kill the lead and move on. Twenty-six percent of all leads are competitors, students, and prisoners. When someone has an immediate need, the lead should go to Sales within minutes. Hot transfers should be made from the telemarketing department (or company) to the reps. Appointments can be scheduled a week out and the reps can change the date as needed. 

If you don’t want the head count to do this inside your company, go to an outside service. They are faster, more productive (therefore cheaper), accept rejection and know how to qualify even those who lie.

For the example company and sales manager above, the pipeline surged, sales surged and a big sigh of relief was heard from the C-Suite. 

Doing what doesn't work is one of 56 reasons sales are down, from the ebook: 56 Ways to Turn Around Failing Sales

The ebook is not gated. Yet.

(istock photo)

3dman_eu / Pixabay

Though channel partners can buy products at discounted rates, vendors still need to invest to help them generate demand. There are three basic models for funding channel partner programs: market development funds, contra-revenue funds, and co-op funds. These are distinctive models, but businesspeople commonly confuse them. Therefore, you should be careful to specify to the partner exactly what kind of funding your company offers.

Market development funds (MDF) are distributed to partners in advance of sales. Their purpose is to help develop the market or markets a channel partner serves. To receive MDF, partners are expected to submit a plan that explains how they will utilize these monies, and they must seek approval from the vendor’s channel marketing or sales team. Vendors typically employ MDF to spur growth efforts in new markets, such as new territories.

In the simplest case, companies allocate MDF funds before a channel partner achieves a steady run rate selling the company’s products. The key word is develop. To help partners establish a pipeline, a company makes MDF available for activities such as renting marketing lists, creating direct marketing materials, and running ads. The funding amount is negotiated between the vendor and partner, with the partner usually providing a simple marketing plan for the vendor to approve.

In contrast to MDF, contra-revenue (contra) funds are distributed to vendors who are already selling the company’s products at a steady clip. Partners accrue these funds as a percentage of the total revenue they generate by selling these products. The percentage is usually low single digits—typically 1 to 3 percent—and is tied to the partner program tier. In tiered partner programs, the highest-level partners receive the largest percentage of funds. This arrangement both rewards the most productive partners and incentivizes them to maintain their status. It also ensures that the vendor invests its contra funds in partners that have a proven track record and that the vendor feels confident will effectively move its products.

Even though contra funds are automatically accrued, partners need to be held accountable for how they spend these monies. When a partner wants to redeem/get paid, it submits a request for approval. To avoid frustration, the partner program should have guidelines in place for acceptable marketing activities and programs. These guidelines are entirely up to the supplier. A company might decide, for example, that purchasing tee shirts or branded tsotchkes is not something they will authorize. Contra funds also expire after a certain period, typically six months, to limit the supplier’s financial liability. CFOs don’t like unclaimed and growing liabilities on the books.

Finally, companies use co-op (cooperative) funds for shared-cost initiatives, such as advertising and direct mail. In most cases, the supplier and the channel partner split the total costs fifty-fifty. Perhaps the best known co-op program is the Intel Inside advertising co-op program, where Intel assumes some of the advertising costs for PC manufacturers. In return, the manufacturers agree to include the Intel Inside logo in their print ads and to incorporate a three-second, five-note Intel Inside tone into their television commercials.[1] Though the distinctions can be a bit blurry, vendors usually allocate co-op funds for activities it prescribes, like including a logo in an ad. In contrast, it makes MDF funds available for activities proposed by channel partners.

This distinction notwithstanding, partners can utilize MDF, contra, and co-op funds for a variety of activities, including events, direct marketing, and promotions. They can also use these funds to purchase demo equipment, not-for-resale (NFR) software licenses, and, in some cases, necessary training that the vendor does not provide as part of the partner program.

A word of caution on all of the partner marketing fund types. Many people use the term MDF generically to mean any type of partner funding. Some confuse contra-revenue and co-op funds. Make sure you clarify in your materials and discussions to avoid potential frustration down the line.

________

[1] The advertising results were stunning. Intel’s research indicated that only 24 percent of European PC buyers were familiar with the Intel Inside logos as of late 1991. One year later that figure had grown to nearly 80 percent, and by 1995 it had soared to 94 percent and continues at these high levels today.

Strategy. Few words are thrown around with as much wanton disregard as ‘the big S’. The internet is full of people who will tell you all about the success they’ve found from their ‘strategies’:

Have you tried personalizing your newsletter subject line? It can 5X your open rate!

We changed the color of our Buy Now button and made $5m!

Unfortunately, these tips and tricks aren’t actual strategies. If running your business is a war, these are merely skirmishes.

“Business is like war in one respect. If its grand strategy is correct, any number of tactical errors can be made and yet the enterprise proves successful.” Robert E. Wood - Executive and Brigadier General

To create real, lasting growth for you and your company you need to create your own grand strategy. And that starts with a solid sales plan.

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett puts it:

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

No time to read all 3447 words of this blog post? Get your sales plan implementation cheat sheet here!

Just what is a sales plan? And why should you care?

A sales plan is the "who, where, why, when and how" that will guide you to hitting your sales goals for the year.

Big picture aside, a sales plan is a month-to-month forecast of the level of sales you expect to achieve and how you’re going to get there. It covers past sales, market concerns, your specific niches, who your customers are, and how you’re going to find them, engage with them, and sell to them.

If done correctly, a sales plan empowers you to spend even more time on growing and developing your startup, rather than responding to the day-to-day developments in sales.

Armed with this information, you can quickly identify any upcoming problems, sales droughts, or opportunities—and then do something about them. It may seem like a lot of work at this point, but once you answer all these questions you’ll be in a place to take your sales and your company to the next level.

Sound exciting? Let’s jump right in.

Want to build your own Sales Plan that will accelerate your growth? Grab our downloadable cheat sheet and fill it in as you go through the post.

10 tactical steps for building a bulletproof sales plan

To make things easier, I’m going to break down your sales plan into 3 distinct parts:

• Sales forecasting and goal-setting
• Market and customer research
• Prospecting and partnerships

Each part naturally works itself into the next, starting with your high-level goals, then taking into consideration market factors, and finally looking at who you know, and how to find more prospects to help hit your sales goals.  

Sales forecasting and goal-setting

1. Set realistic sales goals

Before we get into the process of how you’re going to get your sales this year, we need to talk about something bigger: Goals.

Your sales plan needs an end goal. You need a number—either sales or customers or whatever metric you choose—that will tell you whether or not what you’ve done has been a success or not. I’ve written about setting realistic sales goals in depth before, but what it all comes down to is determining what realistically you can bring in based on the size of the market, your company goals, and the experience and resources available to your sales team.

Aside from that, there are 5 other pitfalls you should be aware of when setting your sales goals:

1. Wishful thinking: You want your business to grow, so it’s understandable that you might be over-optimistic. Start by looking at last year’s forecast and results. Were you being realistic? For new businesses, avoid working out the level of sales you need to be viable and putting this as your figure. In psychology, we’d call this the confirmation bias, but it’s also just straight up bad business.
2. Ignoring your own assumptions: Make sure your forecast is based on your assumptions about the market. If you assume the market’s going to decline and you’re going to lose some market share, it just doesn’t make sense to forecast increased sales.
3. Moving goalposts: For the most part, you want your forecast to be finalized and agreed within a set timeframe so you can get onto the business of, well, business. Avoid making adjustments—even if you discover you’ve been overly optimistic or pessimistic in your sales plan. This document should be a benchmark to judge your success or failure off.  
4. Not asking for consultation: Your sales team are in the trenches with you and probably have the best knowledge about your customers. So, why wouldn’t you ask their opinions, give them time to talk to their customers, and come to an agreement about the targets?
5. Not setting aside time for feedback: Having set your sales goals, you need someone to come in and challenge it. Get an experienced person—an accountant, senior salesperson, or qualified friend—to review the whole document before taking it company wide.

2. Define clear deadlines and milestones

In order to know whether or not the assumptions you’re making in your sales plan are close to the mark, you need to break that big number down into smaller expectations with strict deadlines. We call these milestones and they are incredibly handy in tracking whether or not your sales plan is on the right path.

Clear deadlines and manageable milestones take research and time to develop. They should challenge and motivate your sales team, without being so difficult they kill morale.

Again, start with last year’s numbers (if you have them). Track how sales revenues increased annually and compare your company to the industry standards. Talk to your sales team about what they do during the workweek, whether that’s getting on sales calls, prospecting new customers, or closing deals. Ask how much they’re currently doing, and how much bandwidth they have to do more. This will give you a real, frontline take of what milestones to set.

Next, it’s time to set your milestones. These need to be specific with clear goals and deadlines. For example, you might want to increase your customer base by 20% or increase sales 50% for a specific product. Or even increase the percentage of users on a paid plan by 15% by mid-year. Whatever the milestone is, be clear what your expectations are and set a hard deadline for your team to work towards.

Lastly, set individual milestones for your sales team as well. These individual goals need to take into account the differences among your salespeople. If someone on your team is making a lot of calls but not closing, give them a milestone of upping their close rate. If someone’s great at closing but doesn’t do much outreach, give them a milestone of contacting 10 new prospects a month.

Brought together, these milestones inform and support your overall sales plan, giving you a clear, actionable plan of how you’re going to hit your overall goals for the year.

Market and customer research

3. Pick a niche to focus on and build traction in

Now that we know what we want to hit. Let’s get into the nitty gritty of building out our sales plan.

First, we need to know the market we’re in and the niche we’re going to occupy so we can properly position our business for growth.

What’s a business niche? Essentially, it’s what your business specializes in, but it goes a bit deeper than that. A niche is the space your business occupies, not just with your products, but with your content, your company culture, your branding, and your message. It’s how people identify with you and search you out over the competition.  

As serial entrepreneur Jason Zook explains:

“When you try to create something for everyone, you end up creating something for no one”

Don’t do that.

Instead, start by looking at a niche and asking yourself these questions:

• How big is the market?
• Is there a built-in demand for what you're selling?
• What’s your current market position: Including any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats
• Who are your competitors? What are their strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats?

If you’re stuck, start by going back to your own strengths. List out your strongest interests and passions. Pick a field where the odds are already in your favor. Where you have a proven track record, more expertise to offer, an extensive contact base, and people who can provide you with intros.

The beauty of working in a field that you already have an interest in is that you can build traction through becoming a thought leader.

Do you have something unique to say about your market? Blog, write and contribute to relevant publications. Be a guest on podcasts. Speak at events. Add value to the lives of your prospects before you ever ask them to become a customer.  

The more visibility you can have in your niche, the more chance you have of hitting the goals and milestones in your sales plan.   

And even if you focus on one niche, it doesn’t mean your business can’t grow. Start with one product in one niche and then branch out to a complementary niche. Sell beautiful, handcrafted tea cups? How about a booming doily business? Or customizable teaspoons?

A niche doesn’t limit you. It focuses you.

4. Understand your target customers

It makes no sense spending time and money chasing after the wrong prospects.

Once you know your niche, it’s time to dig into finding out as much as possible about your target customer in order to properly sell to them.

So, just what should you look to define? This depends on your company and your market, but start with basics like company size (in terms of employees or turnover), geographical information, industry, job title, etc—any traits that are common across your best customers or the types of customers you’d love to have.

Also, don’t forget to think about whether they’re going to be a good ‘fit’. If this is a long-term relationship you’re developing rather than a one-night stand, you want to make sure you’re speaking the same language and share a similar culture and vision.

Use this information to build out an ideal customer profile. This can be your ideal ‘perfect customer’ or a fictitious organization that gets significant value from using your product/service and also provides significant value to your company. A customer profile helps you qualify new leads and disqualify ones before you spend months barking up the wrong tree.  

Once you know the type of company you want to target, it’s time to get inside their head. Start by hanging out where they hang out:

• Are they on social media? What’s their network of choice?
• Are they members of any Facebook or LinkedIn groups?
• Can you answer industry questions for them on Quora or Reddit?
• What podcasts do they listen to or what resources do they read?

Get in your customers’ heads and you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them.

5. Map out your customer’s journey

Alright, now we’re getting somewhere solid.

With your ideal customer profile in place, the next part of your sales plan needs to address how that customer becomes your customer. We can do this by mapping out their journey from prospect to loyal customer.

So, what do we need to know about our soon-to-be customers? Let’s start with the basics to ask them:

• What do you want our product to do for you?
• What features are important to you? Why?
• What's your budget for this?
• How are you currently solving this problem?

These are all great questions to ask. However, it’s a huge mistake to only focus on the present.

Great sales people take their buyers on a journey through time—from before they even knew they needed your solution to when they’re a happy, loyal customer. To fully understand their journey as a customer start by asking about past buying experiences:

• When was the last time you bought something similar to our service or product?
• Was that a good or bad experience? Why?
• How did you make your decision back then? What was the decision-making process like?
• How did you evaluate different offers?
• What were the deciding factors that made you chose that particular solution?

If they had a great previous experience, think of ways to align your pitch with that experience and differentiate yourself with your unique value proposition (more on this next!). If they had a bad experience, distance yourself and explain how you would fix that situation.

Next, get your prospect to define their own roadmap to a close by asking them ‘what’s next?’

"What needs to happen to make you a customer?"

If they say they’ll have to get approval from the VP of Finance. Ask:

"Ok, and let's say he agrees that we're the right fit, what's next?"

Putting your prospect in this future-thinking state of mind makes them imagine buying from you. This is a powerful tool, which can help uncover any potential roadblocks and even help accelerate the sales process.

In your sales plan, be sure to address the entire customer journey from pre- to post-sale.

6. Define your value propositions

We know our customers. We know their journey. Now we need to fit ourselves into it in the best way possible. This comes from defining your competitive advantage.

Your competitive advantage is what sets you apart from the competition. Start by asking a few simple questions:

• Why do customers buy from us?
• Why do customers buy from our competitors and not us?
• Why do some potential customers not buy at all?
• What do we need to do to be successful in the future?

Remember that customers buy benefits, not features. When describing your value proposition, it’s easy to get caught up in talking about you. What you’ve made. What you do. Instead, flip the script and talk about what your product will do for your customers. A strong competitive advantage:

• Reflects the competitive strength of your business
• Is preferably, but not necessarily, unique
• Is clear and simple
• May change over time as competitors try to steal your idea
• Must be supported by ongoing market research

It’s not that your helpdesk software has social media integrations and real-time ticket tracking that matters to most customers. It’s the fact that it makes their lives easier and allows them to focus on what they care about most: Creating a great customer experience rather than keeping track of what that one customer said on Twitter last week.

Focus on value, not features.

Your competitive advantage is not just an integral part of your sales plan, but will inform everything your company does moving forward, from marketing to product development. It’s a great example of where sales can influence the development of a product and the direction of a business.

Prospecting and Partnerships

7. Build a prospect list

Now that you know the types of customers you’re after and how you’re going to sell them, it’s time to build out a list of people at these companies to test our theories out on. A prospect list is where we take all the theory and research of the last few sections of our sales plan and put them into action.

At its core, a prospect list is a directory of real people you can contact who would benefit from your product or service. This can be a time-consuming task, but is essential for driving your sales plan and company growth.

First, use your ideal customer profile to start finding target companies:

• Search LinkedIn
• Check out relevant local business networks
• Attend networking events and meetups
• Do simple Google searches
• Check out the member list of relevant online groups

Target up to 5 people at each organization (You can always move laterally towards the proper buyer no matter who in the organization actually responds to you). Targeting more than one individual will give you better odds for connecting on a cold outreach as well as a better chance that someone in your network can connect you personally.

Remember, this isn’t just a massive list of people you could sell to. This is a list based off of the research you’ve done previously in your sales plan. In a sense, a solid sales plan qualifies your prospects before you even spend a minute talking to them.

8. Leverage current client relationships

“Ultimately, almost all software companies end up getting ~80% or so of their new customers from their existing customers once they hit scale. From referrals. From brand. From word of mouth.” SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin

You’re missing out on a huge opportunity if your sales plan only focuses on finding new business leads. Word-of-mouth, introductions, and current customers can be your most solid lead for growth.

Use LinkedIn to see if anyone you know can introduce you to one of your prospects. Or reach out to your most loyal customers and ask them if they know anyone that would benefit from your product or service (you can even offer a referral bonus or discounted rate).

Now, when leveraging current client relationships, you need to make sure you do it in the right way. When asking for an intro, remember:

• A good introduction is two-sided: As the person in the middle, you’re asking your client to vouch for you. If you already have a good relationship this should be a no-brainer. You provided value to them and they should want to help you in turn. Ask them how well they know your target. Would they feel comfortable introducing you to them? By phone? Over email? A good introduction shouldn’t come out of the blue. Ask them to make sure it’s OK to intro and then cc you in on an email with both parties.
• Stay in touch, even when they can’t buy from you: Ask how you can help or support them, even if they stop being a customer. It’s a small gesture that can pay off in the long-run. Things don’t stay the same for long.

9. Identify strategic partners (that reach the same customers)

The last group you should include in your sales plan are any strategic partners—individuals, organizations, or companies—that reach the same customers. Some people call these Complementary Service Providers (CSPs) as they aren’t the competition and instead offer some product or service that complements yours.

For example, if you’re selling a POS system for local stores, you could reach out to a retail organization like the California Retailers Association, or a respected local business consultant.

Plan to build your relationship with these groups through things like:

• Writing for their publication
• Giving speeches at seminars
• Providing resources for their websites
• Starting a mastermind group where you can swap contacts

Remember, you should be offering all of these services free of charge. It’s all about providing value to complementary businesses and fostering a culture of ‘growing together’. The more you add value to the community, the more people will want to send leads your way.   

10. You’re not done yet! Track, measure, and adjust as needed.

Just because you’ve made a solid sales plan, doesn’t mean you get to sit back and watch the cash roll in. Remember what Basecamp founder Jason Fried said about plans:

“A plan is simply a guess you wrote down.”

You’re using everything you know about the market, your unique value, target customers, and partners to define the ideal situation for your company. But yes, try as we might, very few of us actually see anything when we gaze deep into the crystal ball.

Instead, remember that your sales plan is a living, breathing doc and just like the rest of your company, needs to account for and adapt to new features, marketing campaigns, or even new team members who join. You need to return to it regularly to assess whether or not your guesses are turning into reality.

Set regular meetings (at least monthly) to review progress, identify and solve issues, and align your activities across teams to optimize your plan around real-world events and feedback. Learn from your mistakes and victories, and evolve your sales plan as needed.

In most sales situations, the biggest challenge is inertia. But with a solid, detailed sales plan and a dedicated team with clear milestones in place, you’ll have everything you need to push through any amount of friction and keep on track to hit your goals!

All jazzed up and ready to put together your own sales plan? Download our free sales plan implementation cheat sheet that makes it easy to put this guide into action and set your sales team in the right direction.

Have you studied how long it takes your SDRs and AEs to find relevant people to contact as target customers? Do you know the ratio of time spent “finding new leads” to actually reaching out and engaging them? Do you need a process for better sales prospecting that will save your team hundreds of hours by avoiding manual grunt work?

If you’re like us a year ago – you recognize that the process of sales prospecting can eat up more than 50% of your outbound reps’ time, and is generally a slow-moving and frustrating task.

To help our reps spend more time doing what they’re best at (actually selling), we decided to experiment with simplified prospecting, and settled on the following workflow:

The Recipe for Better Sales Prospecting

• Create a concept for a group of companies.
  • eg: Fortune 500 industrials, companies hiring Software Engineers in Chicago, companies that recently raised $10M+

• Build a list of those companies – with their web domain.
  • Hint: you can pay an upworker to do this!

• Run that list of companies through a prospecting tool – Such as Clearbit, Zenprospect, or Lead Genius to identify the right prospects.

How We Found Hundreds of Prospects in 2 Hours

Ok, so what does this actually look like? How many targeted, ICP leads can we find in 2 hours of work? Here’s a recent example.

• Exec Trip to Chicago – June 2017

The Concept: In this case, we wanted to find appropriate people for our execs to meet with while in Chicago for a customer visit. Most of our existing customers in Illinois are retail or technology companies with more than 500 employees – so I used those as parameters for my list.

The Companies: I post an Upwork job saying “generate a list of retail and technology companies in Chicago with more than 500 employees”, and have someone return ~200 company names + domains. In this case, they typically return the list within 24 hours for less than $13 total.

The Prospects: Now’s the fun part – I fire up Google Sheets and upload my CSV of domains, then run the “Clearbit Sheets” extension (where I can indicate what titles I’m interested in) to find the actual prospects I want to talk to.

The result of that is a sheet like this, with hundreds of names, titles, and email addresses.  

After that, I can give this CSV directly to my SDR to set meetings for the trip, or upload it to our CRM with a tag like “Chicago Trip June 2017”

Can this whole process be automated?

This streamlined process was a huge improvement over finding targets one-by-one, but still was quite repetitive and took a lot of our valuable time.

The next step for us was to work with our internal systems team. They took the above process and turned it into a script that does everything from finding the correct leads to tagging them and adding them to our CRM.

Here’s an example of what that script looks like:

That script takes the time from Concept → List of Prospects down to about 20 minutes of employee time (down from 2 hours with just the simplified process).

Key Takeaways

• If you haven’t automated your prospecting process, your sales reps are spending very valuable time clicking around LinkedIn instead of using it on higher-value activities (like talking to customers).

• The first step towards automation is to implement the 3-step processing process – coming up with a Concept, generating Companies, and finally finding the right Prospects.

• Aim to do this prospecting in batches of 100-500

• There are inexpensive tools that excel at each piece of this process, and will only cost you a few dollars to save you hours of your time.

• After you’ve created a consistent, streamlined process, you can work with a sales-minded engineer to turn the entire thing into a simple script, and save countless more hours.

The post Can Sales Prospecting Be Automated? 3 Steps to Getting More Leads In Less Time appeared first on Sales Hacker.

ROverhate / Pixabay

The top three trends in the world of B2B sales today are: social selling, account-based marketing and sales development technologies. According to Inside Out’s 2016 CXO Benchmark Study, 3 out of 4 executives said that social selling techniques are having the biggest influence on their marketing strategy. In addition, 70% said they are implementing account-based marketing practices, while two-thirds highlighted the need for sales development platforms. And a fourth factor all have in common is that managers recognize the need to motivate their sales teams to successfully use these new platforms.

The majority of companies which report doing well in the CXO Benchmark Study, have two business methodologies in common:

1. Both are employing social selling, a system in which sales teams use social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.) to interact with prospects.
2. Both have aligned the goals of their marketing departments with those of their sales teams to follow account-based marketing principles.

However, even with the best business methodologies in place, sales development technologies are needed. The most successful companies have invested in up-to-date call management systems, which connect to their CRM systems, in order to analyze, categorized and prioritized lead development information. This seamless interaction between call management systems and CRM systems allows leads to be funneled into the pipeline properly e.g. qualified leads, with the best time to reach them and places the right contact information at the sales rep’s fingertips. This process keeps entire sales teams (SDR, Inside and Outside sales) in step with the entire sales process.

In addition to business methodologies and technology, there is one further aspect which all good companies report having in common, and that is–proper motivation from management in order to get the best from a sales team. Beware! One team member with a poor attitude can be contagious, lowering total team performance. But there are ways to get the most out of sales reps. Claire McConnachie, a Case Western graduate and recruitment consultant, outlines 5 ways to keep sales teams motivated:

1. Assure they have proper training when they are hired; and have continued training, coaching and career development opportunities throughout their employment.
2. Speak to underperforming sales reps to figure out where their process is going wrong. Sometimes a valuable coaching session might be all that is needed to accelerate sales.
3. Make time to spend with top reps to ensure they stay “top performers.”
4. Let sales reps do what they do best: Highly skilled, successful sales pros should be spending as much of their work hours selling. Not cold prospecting, not otherwise prospecting, not stuffing envelopes, not filling out forms. They should be selling!
5. Understand each sales rep on a personal level. Don’t treat sales individuals as a collective unit–each person is different. Getting the best out of a rep requires that managers connect with them on an individual level to understand their motivations, strengths and weaknesses. This information helps managers know their sales reps on a deeper level, which is helpful for understanding how to get the most out of them.

In addition, consider these motivators to help create good teams:

• Recognize achievement
• Note the challenge of work
• Present an opportunity to move up
• Match compensation with performance

If managers can incorporate these motivators into goal planning and coaching conversations, they can elevate sales teams toward higher levels of success.

“It is important to learn if achievement, recognition, promotion potential, or the inherent challenge of the work play a primary role with your rep,” says author Kevin F. Davis. “A desire for achievement might be satisfied by noting their successes to the team as a whole, while recognition could be offered by having them give a presentation to the senior leadership. A desire for more responsibility or promotion might lead to involving them in hiring or having them serve as mentors and guides for new salespeople.”

Although money is a motivator, managers should also find out what drives each member of the sales team beyond the paycheck. Money is almost always stated to be one of the goals. But, money is a means to an end. People want money so that they can do something with it and everybody has a dream. Find out what the members of the sales team are reaching for … a vacation house in Hawaii, a trek up Everest, an antique Mercedes-Benz. Find a picture of a beach on Waikiki and post it above that rep’s computer screen; get the other rep a subscription to a mountaineering magazine; buy that other a toy model of that Benz to keep on their desk. A good manager shows their sales reps that they understand them as individuals and also support their dreams.

In conclusion, be sure to always help sales reps achieve their highest performance by coaching them on the best business practices, presenting them with the best sales acceleration technology tools, and motivating them by making a personal investment in the sales “individual” along with the sales team.

How do you know if your business idea is any good?

In a video published to the I Will Teach You to Be Rich Youtube channel, Ramit Sethi, CEO of I Will Teach You to Be Rich and GrowthLab, presents what he calls the "pay certainty technique." (He named it that, he says, because it makes certain you get paid.)

Once you've narrowed down some possibilities for your target audience — say, 40-45-year-old women or 35-year-old senior executives — it's time to ask yourself two questions:

1. Would these people have the ability to pay ? Do they actually have enough money?
2. Do they have the willingness to pay? Would they even agree to pay for this? 

It seems simple, but being honest with yourself about these two questions alone can eliminate up to 75% of non-tenable business ideas, Sethi says. He gives an example: Imagine you're a really good stylist. You're excellent at dressing men.

You ask yourself the two questions above in regards to three potential sets of customers:

18-year-old men

1. Do they have the ability to pay? No, they don't have the money.
2. Do they have the willingness to pay? No. "They don't care. They dress in tee-shirts. They go to college."

65-year-old retiree men

1. Do they have the ability to pay? Yes, they have the money.
2. Do they have the willingness to pay? No. "They're wearing Hawaiian shirts at the golf course. They don't give a damn."

35-to-40-year-old senior executives or executives

1. Do they have the ability to pay? Yes, they have the money.
2. Do they have the willingness to pay? Yes. "For them, looking good is important to their corporate careers."

"Is this a broad generalization?" Sethi asks. "Yes. Are there exceptions? Yes. Do I want to spend all my time pursuing a potential idea that has very little chance of succeeding? No."

Watch the full video on Youtube » 

SEE ALSO: How to find a business idea — and figure out if it's any good

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: There's a simple way to see if your business idea is any good

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Regardless your level, look at your weekly calendar. Unless you are a total dolt, I can guess what it looks like:

1. Your time is completely filled, often with overlaps in meetings, some with multiple things scheduled at the same time.
2. The demands on your time exceed what you can schedule—and you do a lit of shifting/juggling.
3. Your to-do list isn’t getting shorter, in fact it’s getting longer–and you seem to be completing fewer things each week.
4. You’ve never been busier. You may feel like you are accomplishing a lot-because of your activity levels, but at the end of the month/quarter/year, if you made your numbers it was probably a real struggle.
5. You don’t see things getting better.

It sucks, but that’s what I see with everyone I deal with (I don’t waste time on dolts.)

It seems getting things done is just harder–not just the volume of things we have to get done, but the process of it. Working with our customers is much more complex—more people involved in the Decisionmaking Process. Track the CEB numbers—when Challenger first came out, the number of people involved in complex decisions was about 5.3, about 18 months ago it went up to 6.8. I suspect when I speak with Brent and Nick in a few weeks the data will have changed, probably going to over 7. Our customers buying processes are not only more complex, they are getting longer (with far too many ending in no decision made).

But it’s not just our customers–within our own companies, getting things done is getting harder! Because we have complex solutions, we have more people involved in the selling process. We need to get specialists, support and others involved. Increasingly we have to tailor deals to respond to our customers needs. We need help in configuring/assembling the right solution, pricing, contract changes, we need some special support, a modification in shipping/supply chain issues—whatever it is, we are spending more and more time getting things done within our own companies, robbing us of the time we need to work with customers. Even if we are selling standard products, there is no such thing as a standard deal.

We do all these things, struggling to get our jobs done. But we have to do all these things, otherwise we don’t get our jobs done. I face it too–at first I hoped I could invent the 8 day/3o hour week–but I gave up. I did send a request to Elon Musk, he seems up to the challenge.

Our clients face the same thing. They asked us for help. Most of the time, we would focus on the customer side. We focused on how they sold, looking for ways to improve results/productivity: How can we compress sales cycles, how can we increase win rates, how can we improve average deal sizes. We spend a lot of time looking at time management or at tools to help productivity. Usually, we can do a lot—often time to results is a challenge, the change management process is a challenge, or other things. We help clients address these issues, but we realized we were missing a huge opportunity to drive sales productivity.

We started focusing internally. What are the things that detract from the time sales people can spend with customers? We had noticed, anecdotally, in our largest clients, sales people were spending a lot of time getting things done internally.

We started measuring Time Available For Selling. That is how much time were sales people actually spending working in deals. There are a lot of ways to define this, but often we look at: Time spent preparing for a customer meeting (F2F or V2V), time spent with the customer, time spent in follow up.

The results were stunning—all with large, relatively high performing organizations. Typically, we would see Time Available For Selling in the 9-22% range! The immediate question is, “What’s happening during the other 91-72% of their time?” These folks were incredibly busy, a lot of the time drains were the activities necessary to get things done in their own organizations. For instance, getting support, getting approvals, working with others to generate proposals, working on pricing/contacts, and so forth. All of these were necessary activities to getting deals done, but all were time away from working with customers.

It turns out one of the biggest drains on sales productivity is the complexity of getting things done within their own organizations! Without changing anything about how people sold, if you could just make more time available for selling, there was a potential for huge gains in sales productivity/win rates. For example, we measure one very large client’s time available for selling. It was about 17%. Over 20 months, we got it to 36%–more than doubling the time available for selling, driving the potential for much higher results. In looking at the time drains, we found a number of cumbersome, slow processes. By just simplifying and streamlining many of their most cumbersome processes, we freed the sales people up to spend more time with customers.

We see this with virtually every organization we work with. Years of legacy systems, old processes, programs—all layered on top of each other. Organizations have tendencies not to stop things, but just to layer to programs and processes over the old ones. Many organizations, after a number of M&A activities had redundant and confusing processes and workflows.

Simply by simplifying your own operations, you have the possibility of dramatically improving sales productivity!

It starts with knowing a few basic things. Do some research and analysis–measure time available for selling. You will probably be shocked and how low it is.

Once you know that, look at your internal workflows and processes–look at things that you can stop or eliminate, things that you can simplify. Consider whether the sales people should be doing these things, or are they someone else’s responsibility. Just the process of simplifying your business, can drive tremendous internal improvements and cost reduction, but more importantly, it frees sales people up to concentrate on what they are accountable for: Working with customers!

Afterword: If you need help assessing things like Time Available For Selling, reach out. It ends up being pretty easy to do some assessments of this.

When most businesses think about how they want to generate leads, they typically gravitate towards PPC ad platforms like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. As a result, YouTube is often overlooked.

Unfortunately for these businesses (but fortunately for you), YouTube can be a fantastic platform for capturing new leads.

In this post, I’m going to show you exactly how to use YouTube to generate more leads for your business.

Why Use YouTube to Generate Leads

There are a ton of reasons why you should be using YouTube to grow your business. The first is that videos on this platform are extremely search-engine friendly. Not only do they rank well in Google’s video search, but they also appear in YouTube’s own search engine.

Why does that matter? Google is the top-rated, most used search engine… and YouTube is the second.

That means that if you want people to see your content, turning it into a YouTube video gives you two legs up.

YouTube is also a video sharing platform and video is exploding right now. It is the most dynamic and engaging type of content viewers can access online, and it’s often valuable for both businesses and viewers. Because it’s so dynamic, it’s the perfect platform to tell your brand’s story in a way that will resonate with your target market.

The last big benefit? YouTube videos are highly shareable, much more so than Facebook posts or tweets. You can share a single YouTube video on every last social media platform, if you want, and it won’t feel out of place.

All these benefits translate directly into more sharing, more visibility, and more lead generation. Now that you understand the benefits, let’s discuss how to do it.

1. Brand Your Business’s Channel

You want your channel to be branded from top to bottom—or, more accurately, from your YouTube channel art all the way to your thumbnail images. This gives your YouTube channel—and all the videos within it—a more professional and credible appearance. This is essential in building trust from your viewers, which in turn is necessary for lead generation purposes.

The channel “Beauty and the Boutique,” pictured above, is a fantastic example of this. Her channel icon matches her channel art (which is the banner that stretches the top of the page). Her channel art also has the same color scheme and font as the thumbnails of each individual video. As a result, her channel looks professionally put together, making her seem more of an authority.

2. Utilize Keywords Effectively

One of the biggest advantages to using YouTube as a lead gen tool is that it’s really easy to find things. If you want to actually benefit from this particular perk though, you need to make sure the text surrounding the video is fully optimized for search. This means having plenty of keywords.

All of the text describing your video is searchable in both Google and YouTube search engines, so you want to get the most out of it. This includes the video’s headline, description, and tags. Use a combination of specific short and long tail keywords to make it easier for your audience to find your videos when they’re looking. YouTube is a fantastic search engine, after all. Treat it like one!

This video places keywords in a number of different places and shows up in search results for “rainbow cake,” “how to make a rainbow cake,” and “rainbow unicorn cake.”

If you’re wondering where to start, SEMrush has a fantastic Google keyword research tool. Keyword Tool also has an incredible YouTube keyword researching tool that is specific to the platform.

3. Add Clickable CTAs

Getting video views is great, but ultimately, you want to convert those views into leads. Adding clickable call to action buttons at the end of your videos is essential to capturing lead information.

Many businesses make the mistake of saying, “Click on the link in the bio for more info!” Conversely, a clickable-CTA doesn’t require the user to scroll and find the link; it’s directly in front of them, significantly increasing the odds that they’ll click. And no matter where this YouTube video is shared, those CTA buttons will always be active.

To add a clickable CTA to your YouTube video, click to edit your video, and then navigate to the “Cards” tab. Choose the “Link” option, after enabling it if you need to.

If you’re setting up a link CTA for the first time, you’ll need to verify your account and add an associated website. Note that you’ll need to add in the URL for the specific site address you want to send users to—not just your general homepage.

Once you do this, create the card by choosing an associated site, and then add a card title (which will only be visible to you), a CTA, and a text snippet. You can also choose an image to add to the CTA.

Add your newly created card to your video. You can place the CTA at any point of the video. It’s often most effective when placed at the very end of your content, when users have no incentive to remain on the page.

4. Send Traffic to Specialized Landing Pages

That CTA we just added to your videos needs to send users somewhere. If you want to capture leads right away, the best place you can send them is right to a landing page. However, you don’t want to just hope that they’ll convert once they notice your newsletter subscription box on the side of your blog.

For best results, your landing page should be clean, organized, and entirely focused on generating leads. For instance, you can use contrasting colors and different sized text to emphasize the CTA on the page. It’s also essential that your landing pages are secure, so that users feel comfortable submitting their information.

Most importantly, perhaps, is that your landing page be consistent with the offer or message that you used to send users there. If you’ve offered a free e-book as a lead magnet, you don’t want to swipe it out with a free trial of your software—even if the trial is the better value. If your landing page and in-video offers aren’t consistent, you’ll confuse and frustrate viewers and they won’t opt-in; they’ll click away instead.

5. Organize Your Content into Playlists

In most cases, businesses typically create multiple videos for a single campaign that all end with similar CTAs and send viewers to the same landing page. Grouping these videos into a single playlist is one of the best things you can do when it comes to nurturing leads. That way, if users aren’t ready to click on your CTA, they’ll automatically be ushered to the next video, which may nudge them closer to clicking.

The video suggestions that come as a result of intentionally created playlists also keep users bouncing around on your own YouTube channel longer, instead of leaving to view content created by your competitors. And the more content they watch from you, the more they’ll trust you and remember you. Even if they don’t convert as a lead right away, they’re more likely to later on if they’ve watched more than one of your videos.

6. Respond to Comments

In many cases, potential leads and customers won’t necessarily reach out to your customer service team to ask a question or voice a concern; they’ll drop it in the comments section of your video. Because of this, responding to comments is crucial. It gives you the chance to answer questions and overcome objections.

Even more than that, responding to comments and engaging with potential leads gives you the opportunity to build relationships and trust. Users love to see businesses that interact with their content on social media sites, and this can go a long way in helping you generate those leads. People are more likely to sign up to hear from you frequently if they respect and trust you.

To easily monitor the comments on all your videos, you can go to the “Community” tab, found within the creator’s studio. You’ll see tabs containing all published comments and comments held for review. You can use this feed to find recent comments so you can respond to them as soon as possible.

7. Partner Up With Influencers

Joining forces with well-known influencers can increase the visibility of your content by bumping its shares and can earn you the trust of new users more quickly. Featuring testimonials from industry influencers can be particularly powerful and helpful when it comes to generating more leads.

There are different types of influencers you can reach out to, and in almost all cases, choosing influencers in your industry and niche will benefit you most. Getting an endorsement from Jon Loomer on your Facebook Ads software, for example, would be a heck of a lot more meaningful than a similar endorsement from a big-name celebrity. That celebrity probably has more followers, but if they don’t belong to the field, their opinions don’t mean a lot.

In many cases, micro-influencers are your best bet for helping you to create authentic content that will generate leads on YouTube. Micro-influencers typically have around 10,000 followers on social media, and can include bloggers and industry thought leaders. Their audiences are smaller than major influencers, but they are typically more trusted and respected by their very engaged audience.

8. Get to the Point Fast

Both your headline and the first few seconds of your video are critical, and you need to get to the point and grab your users’ attention immediately with both. Statistically, if you don’t get users interested in your social video within the first three seconds, they click away. That’s not a lot of time.

To help with this, all videos should start with an interesting, engaging hook. The first images, text, or words should be enough to make a user stop in their tracks. In the example below, the video’s narrator tells users why they should care about the subject of the video within the first second and a half, stating that “a team without trust isn’t really a team.” That’s a pretty powerful, impactful statement that will make users want to listen to the rest—and to find a solution.

And since you can share your YouTube videos on multiple social media platforms, adding captions is always a good idea; many videos start on auto-play, which has the sound turned off until the user enables it.

9. Provide Value

This is the crux of content marketing: it only works when you’re providing real, nearly tangible value to those consuming your content. There’s two parts to this equation: your video needs to be valuable enough that users are willing to consider signing up for whatever lead gen offer you have, and the offer itself needs to offer enough value to get them to actually sign up.

Tutorials and educational, informative videos are great for this purpose. They’re immensely valuable because they provide actionable, educational content that reiterates your business’s authority and expertise on the subject. This is especially true if you’re able to offer an in-depth solution to the viewer’s problems or pain points that would help sell them on your product.

Similarly, offers like e-books and whitepapers are great lead magnets to increase lead generation results because they’re so valuable and provide incredible knowledge for free. Users can download these resources and refer back to them at any point.

10. Share the Video Everywhere

YouTube’s share options are both extensive and simple to use; all you need to do is click.

All the steps on this list will give your YouTube videos everything they need to get conversions, but sharing those videos everywhere will increase the lead gen potential tenfold. And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere.

YouTube videos can be shared on all different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Pinterest. You can also embed these videos within blog posts on your site, making your content more dynamic and interesting, and on the landing page you’re using to capture lead information.

The more your video is shared, and the more platforms it’s on, the larger reach it will have. This means more views, and a lot more leads.

Conclusion

If you want to generate more leads through social media, you should start investing time into YouTube. This video-sharing platform will perform high in search engines, has great clickable CTAs that will take users right to your landing page, and has content that’s easily shared across multiple types of platforms. Your campaigns will see increases in both visibility and engagement, helping you capture more leads and guide them closer towards conversion.

As a recent McKinsey article points out, as much as half of a company’s value creation rests with its sales force. Their findings confirm what many other researchers have also found – that the sales experience is a top factor when it comes to buying decisions.

But there’s a perhaps unexpected twist: McKinsey’s study also shows that top performing sales organisations pay as much attention to the rep experience as they do the customer experience: in other words, they treat their sales people like customers…

There are many more valuable takeaways in the McKinsey report than I can possibly hope to cover in this relatively short blog: I strongly recommend that you review the full article. I want to draw your attention here to a few of the most profound findings, and offer my take on the appropriate responses and actions.

THE SALES PERFORMANCE GAP IS A TALENT GAP

Firstly, there is a growing gap between top sales performers and the rest. The difference is at its greatest in complex B2B sales environments, where it is not unusual for performance to vary by a factor of six or seven times between the top tier and the bottom.

This is fundamentally a talent management problem. Even when organisations can identify who their top performers are, they often struggle to understand what sets them apart. They fail to identify the key characteristics, skills and behaviours that characterise their most effective sales people.

Some of the gap can clearly be ascribed to innate capabilities – something I’ll return to when we consider the hiring process. But in my experience a significant element of the performance gap is actually related to learned behaviours – and these winning habits, if they can be understood, can be replicated.

If we can identify these behaviours – you can think of them in simple terms as what the top sales performers have learned that they need to know, do and avoid at each stage of the buying process – then we can train, equip and coach the “willing middle” to adopt them, in the confidence that their performance will improve accordingly.

DEVELOPING THE “WILLING MIDDLE”

It’s probably worth explaining what we mean by the willing middle: after you exclude the top and bottom performing tiers, the majority of the sales force sits somewhere in between. A sub-set of this group (the “willing middle”) is open to the idea of learning from the best. They have the clear potential to improve.

The opposite part of this tier (the “unwilling middle”) are either unwilling or unable to change. Assuming that we’ve made reasonable efforts to educate them, the obvious conclusion is that these people are bad hires without the potential for improvement, and their unsatisfactory performance means that – along with the persistent bottom performers – they are best persuaded that their careers should go in a different direction.

Our skills development programmes will have the greatest impact when they are focused on making it as easy as possible for the willing middle to embrace the top performers’ winning habits. And when our induction programmes equip our new hires to quickly adopt these same winning habits, we give them the best possible foundation for success.

But that, of course, assumes we’re actually hiring the right people in the first place…

HIRING PEOPLE WITH WINNING POTENTIAL

If we haven’t identified the common characteristics a top sales person in our particular sales environment, we’re likely to make more bad hires than good ones. And in most sales environments, factors like attitude, aptitude and ability turn out to be far more reliable predictors of future success than experience.

Traditional hiring approaches – which have often focused too much on experience because it’s the easiest thing to assess from a combination of CV and interview – often fail to pay the appropriate attention to attitude, aptitude or ability, because it takes an effort to assess these factors.

But with the widespread availability of well-proven assessment tools – backed by a growing army of experienced consultants who have the ability to interpret them – there can never be an excuse for failing to understand the common characteristics of our existing top performers, or for not testing new candidates against these critical success factors. The cost and consequences of failure is simply too high.

ADAPTIVE TRAINING

If we’re to fully develop the potential of talented sales people, a one-approach-suits-everyone training programme probably isn’t going to deliver the results that we are looking for. We have to recognise that different people may have different development needs, and will react in different ways to different training methodologies.

In particular, we have to acknowledge the pivotal role that first-line sales managers play in developing the capabilities of every member of their team. We can’t sit back and expect the learning and development department (assuming we have one) to carry the burden of skills development on their own.

What we need is an adaptive training programme that leverages a variety of delivery methods combined with a programme targeted at sales managers that equips and enables them to fulfil this vital role of continual personalised feedback, coaching and development.

This is not a trivial commitment. But the consequences of failing to treat our sales people as customers are far more significant, far more expensive, and far more damaging.

So – what’s your experience?

⇨ Download our guide to “MOVING THE MIDDLE“

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If you have been following, I’ve been using the Toyota Production System (TPS) as the foundation for this discussion. It is the foundation form much of our thinking on lean manufacturing. In the last post, I got through the first 4 of the 14 principles in TPS. I’ll continue with Principle 5.

Principle 5: Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, get quality right the first time. This is one of the most famous aspects of TPS. The goal of TPS was to build both highly efficient and highly responsive manufacturing processes, eliminating waste and defects. Under TPS, every person working on the manufacturing line had the power to stop the line if there was a problem. The reasoning is very powerful, “if we don’t fix problems in the line, they will keep recurring, our defects and waste will go up, our quality declines.” Stopping the line was an important concept in TPS. It always sought to eliminate problems, producing the best possible output. (In TPS, when a person stopped a line, their colleagues and managers would cluster around the station helping the person determine and fix the problem–a very collaborative process where everyone learned.)

Too often, we don’t do this–whether it’s in our own personal workflow, or in how our organizations work. Take, for example, executing sales calls–whatever they might be. Whether they are inbound/outbound calls to SDRs, calls made by sales people, face to face meetings. If we aren’t producing the outcomes we expect from these calls, clearly something is wrong. It may be in our preparation, it may be we are calling on the wrong people, it may be we aren’t creating the right value in those calls or engaging customers ineffectively. It makes no sense continuing to do this, hoping things will change. (Einstein was actually a lean manufacturing guru. He said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome.)

Stopping to fix problems is critical if we want to drive our effectiveness and efficiency. Individually, we need to pause to examine what we do–are we producing the right results from our sales calls, are we developing nd executing the best deal strategies, are we leveraging out time most effectively. We need to constantly refine and improve everything we do.

Organizationally, we need to look at the same things–examining our workflows and processes, are they producing the right results. Are they creating problems in the “line?” For example, marketing meeting its lead volumes is not useful, if they aren’t enabling sales people to produce the results we need. Complexity is a huge issue in virtually every organization (for example, we are measuring time available for selling at 9-22% in large organizations). It’s driven both by the complexity and problems in our processes/workflows. We need to constantly be identifying these problems and eliminating them, if we want to produce the right overall results.

We can also learn a lot about the problem solving processes that manufacturing folks use. Remember I said, when a person stopped the line, all the co workers and managers clustered around that station helping solve the problem. They didn’t leave the person alone, waiting, they didn’t point fingers. Their job was to get the line running as quickly as possible, with the problem fixed. We should be doing the same thing as we look at sales and marketing.

Principle 6: Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment. I’ve covered some of this in the discussion of Principles 2 and 4. I’ll try to minimize repeating myself. We know we can’t begin to identify and solve problems until we have defined our core processes and workflows. For example, we can’t improve sales person onboarding until we understand the recruiting, hiring, onboarding process (you might be wondering why I include recruiting and hiring–you’ll understand when I talk about Principle 11.) Without these standardized processes, we can’t identify problems, we can’t no what works and doesn’t work.

Employee empowerment is critical. In TPS, the thinking was the person closest to the work knew the most about what was happening and where there are potential problems. Unless we empower everyone in the organization in figuring out how to collectively create the best workflow and best processes, we won’t solve our problems successfully. If you look at how lean manufacturers do this–they do engage “experts,” and managers, but the people on the front line are always the most critical, simply because they are the ones doing the work and experiencing the problems.

If we want to drive performance in the organization, if we want to accelerate our ability to change and improve, we have to be involving our people as part of that change.

Principle 7: Use visual control so no problems are hidden. Now you know where your SFDC dashboards come from. Dashboards and visual controls are key to quickly identifying and solving problems. Rather than hiding them, the thinking is we want to find them as quickly as possible to eliminate them. Every factory line had their own dashboards looking at the critical performance metrics for the factory–they focused no only on outputs (e.g. Sales), but on leading indicators as well. Each group on the factory had their dashboards which focused on their functions, all the way down to each worker.

One of the most fascinating things in visiting a factory using the TPS principles is every workstation had a Red/Green lights. The idea being, if there was a problem in the line, the worker would immediately stop the line and the Red light would go on so everyone could see where the problem was and go help solve it.

Too often, we use the dashboards and metrics as ways to assign blame. Imagine how much more effective we could be if we were anxious not to assign blame but to find problems quickly so we could eliminate them. Each of us need to think about our metrics as do our organizations. They are there to help us see when things are going wrong so we can fix them.

Principle 8: Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes. I can already hear it, vendors of sales and marketing automation are thinking, “What’s he going to say?” Sales people are thinking, “I can leverage principle 8 to get rid of CRM!” Technology and automation has always been a key part of improving manufacturing processes. But in TPS, technology was applied very carefully. There are test/prototype lines that were used to test new approaches before incorporating them into a production line. It’s understandable, putting untested technology into a production line could have multi million dollar consequences.

But most importantly, the people on the lines were involved in those decisions. The technology impacted their work and abilities to get their jobs done. If the technology didn’t improve what they could do, the technology wasn’t implemented. If it didn’t improve the processes, it didn’t get implemented.

We need to do the same thing as we look at sales and marketing automation. If it isn’t helping the people on the front line, it will never produce the results it should. If the people aren’t involved in assessing and testing it, you don’t know whether it serves them and helps them improve. Too often, we inflict new technologies on our people. They don’t understand why, how, what to do. They see it as an impediment to their effectiveness. As a result, morale declines, productivity declines, effectiveness declines. If the sales and marketing tools you are using aren’t helping the people doing the work, then you shouldn’t implement it.

Principle 9: Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others. I probably don’t need to spend time talking about the “understand the work” part of this principle. Hopefully, you get it. But the last 2 parts of the principle is where all the difference is. Live the philosophy is critical. You may recall the philosophies underlying the principles are intensely people centric. This principle falls under the philosophical pillar, “Add value to the organization by developing your people.” Throughout these principles you see concepts of servant leadership, empowerment, learning and developing. It’s the people doing the work that can find and identify problems–improving productivity.

Leaders in TPS recognized the role of the leader was to serve their people. That the only ways results could be achieved is if the leaders were committed to developing, coaching, teaching and empowering their people. Without this, the organization could never produce the results expected.

Enough said.

Conclusion: Hang in there, we only have 5 more principles to go. I’ll finish those in the next post. Hopefully, you are seeing much of the philosophy and principles of TPS are simply good business management. All can be applied in some way to sales and marketing. Some have limitations–primarily because in sales and marketing we always have the human factor–our customers, our partners, our peers. These drive variability into the processes, these are never constant and will change from person to person, deal to deal, moment to moment.

When I think of monopoly I think of a mustachioed man with a nice hat and a highland terrier.

I also think of family arguments and Christmas flashbacks; Monopole mon amour, directed by Resnais…

Yet, those aren’t the only monopoly connotations you should be worried about. The New York Times recently reported that a whopping 77% of mobile social traffic is owned by Facebook, 74% of the ebook market is Amazon, and Google owns 88% percent of the search advertising market.

They aren’t the only monopolies around and they’re only in specific sectors. A report from eMarketer showed that in 2016 Facebook and Google collectively accounted for 57% of all mobile advertising – and that figure is rising. Maybe it’s not a monopoly at all, but a duopoly?

Market position isn’t static, it’s dynamic. Monopolies form and fade, doing so in response to specific factors and environments.

In this article, we’ll look at the rise and fall of some monopolistic scenarios and try to learn a little about how this current dominance may look moving forward.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as AOL

East India Trading Companies and the birth of corporate monopolies

One of the first widely known examples of monopolies may be that of the trading companies established as quasi-feudalist mercantilism began to transition closer to what we might consider early manifestations of capitalism.

(Finally managed to make use of my degrees…)

This was the birth of empire and the global expansion was delivered largely through the competition of private forces. The East India Company (EIC) was the British wing of this venture and, at its largest, its operations amounted to half the world’s trade. It traded in cotton, silk, salt, tea, opium, and much more. The company ruled much of India until 1858 when the British government stepped in and established the Raj.

What we see in the East India Company is a business established during a period of broader social change. The legal foundations which enabled capitalist modes of exchange had been formed in Germanic states and the codification of laws and legal practices was beginning to occur across northern Europe.

The printing press had been invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, only 160 years before the EIC received its Royal Charter. Europe was going through an information revolution; albeit, a much slower one than we’re enjoying now.

According to Professor Jeremiah Dittmar of the London School of Economics, writing in 2011, European cities which adopted the printing press experienced 60% higher economic growth than those which didn’t buy into the technology from 1450 to 1600. Ironically, in the context of this article, the printing press itself was monopolistic as the knowledge of materials was quasi-proprietary:

The first known “blueprint” manual on the production of movable type was only printed in 1540. Over the period 1450-1500, the master printers who established presses in cities across Europe were overwhelmingly German. Most had either been apprentices of Gutenberg and his partners in Mainz or had learned from former apprentices.

The point is that the East India Company was entering new waters, both literally and figuratively.

It was built on technological and social advancements and being the first big player on the scene. It was helped by being granted a legal monopoly from the outset, but it had competition to face too.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was founded in 1602 and was awarded a 21-year Dutch monopoly from the outset. There are some, including Timothy Brook and Bryan Taylor, who would argue the VOC were the most successful company ever to exist. Though the two, VOC and EIC, held multiple monopolies between them, neither completely outstripped the other.

A duopoly was held.

Ultimately, the EIC was to lose its privileged position. The company was now in some financial difficulty and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 the British government nationalized the company, absorbed its army, and gradually wound down its operations until 1874.

The monopolies collapsed due to a changing market, unsustainable growth, and state intervention.

Keep this in mind.

The rise-and-falls in the information age

IBM, the first real tech company

IBM was one of the first tech monopolies within what we now consider to be the tech space. Founded in 1911 and named IBM in 1924, it had a solid hold on expertise and market share for most of the twentieth century.

IBM came up with so many of the technologies which we now take for granted. The first commercially available modern computers were thanks to the research and development undertaken within the company. IBM even launched the first smartphone – without commercial success. The ability to be ahead of the curve innovation-wise meant that not only did IBM lead the pack, but other companies were reliant on the services or hardware it offered.

Despite all this success, IBM no longer has a monopolistic position in the market. That’s not to say they’re not doing well – $80 billion in revenue is no small number. Yet, IBM now makes up one of many businesses operating in the specific sectors it fills. More than that, there are worrying signs as IBMs revenue has declined for the 20th consecutive quarter.

The success of IBM was first threatened when other companies began entering into their turf, making hardware which could compete with IBM – particularly aiming that hardware at the consumer market. This failure to engage the consumer is reflected even further in how IBM lagged behind with the rapid expansion of the internet. IBM lost out recently to Amazon for a CIA cloud computing contract worth $600 million, even though IBM’s proposal was 30% cheaper. It turned out that the IBM proposal was simply significantly worse than Amazon’s pitch.

IBM hasn’t collapsed, by any means. But it lost its dominance in line with significant trends:

• The first on the scene won’t hold its market share forever
• New markets open up and others are faster to exploit this
• The internal organization becomes difficult to negotiate

On this last point, it’s worth mentioning IBM’s Roadmap 2015 – dubbed Roadkill 2015 by employees – which was geared according to Businessweek to benefit short-term shareholder returns at the expense of staff and long term success with customers.

According to Steve Denning, from the Forbes article linked above:

The real challenge for the CEO of IBM is a fundamental shift in business goals and culture. Instead of a world where a high-pressure sales teams can lock in customers to long-term contracts for using unchanging software with high margins, now IT services providers have to compete with firms that offer continuous innovation, pay-as-you-go fee structures and freedom to exit any time. To compete successfully in this emerging world, the IT service providers will have to delight their customers on a continuing basis, by offering continuous innovation.

The old fashioned corporate business model which led IBM to success in the twentieth and early twenty-first century is no longer what customers are looking for. IBM’s delivery of corporate and small business software was disrupted partly by the innovative practices and models of cloud-based startups in that scene.

John Wookey from Salesforce told the New York Times:

The economics are different, but what is really different is the relationship with the consumer. We issue a new version of the product every four months. If the customer doesn’t like it, he stops paying.

Technological innovations like cloud computing and the availability of powerful hardware to all opened up space in the market for companies to offer greater flexibility to their customers’ needs. Add to this the fact that startups are generally significantly more agile than large businesses, who have to pass every change and proposal through multiple boards of managers and executives, then you end up compounding the impact of this flexibility.

As Denning put in 2014:

Established firms like IBM are used to operating in a world where new versions of packaged software come out every few years, making it difficult to get out of a license when company data depends on it. The emerging world of cloud computing will require much greater agility.

Wookey’s Salesforce now has a revenue of $8.39 billion – over a 100% increase on their 2014 figures.

We’ll leave IBM and Salesforce with this quote to bear in mind from Wookey:

The hardest thing is to be successful again when you’ve been successful in the old world

AOL probably gave away more free CDs than anyone in history

AOL is still a household name, but there are likely many Millennials now entering the workforce whose only reference point is the late nineties rom-com You’ve Got Mail – which, surprisingly, has aged better than AOL.

It isn’t really fair to single out AOL alone without looking at the battle which raged afterward. AOL was the center of the internet. It provided the search and emailing capacities that so many relied on. Unfortunately for AOL, the pioneer will eventually lose its dominance.

AOL’s most powerful moment probably came in November 1998 when they bought the most popular browser of the time: Netscape. AOL was integrated into so much of internet life and everyone I know has clear memories of throwing away those free CDs they gave out.

Sadly, for the tech pioneer, the merger with TimeWarner proved to be a fairly unsuccessful move and was followed up with the dot-com crash which saw the company stock plummet from $226 billion to a paltry $20 billion – a pauper’s figure.

With an inability to recover, we see a few similar steps typical of a dying star:

• Massive staff cuts and relocation
• CEOs are replaced in relatively quick succession
• Acquisitions are attempted and prove unsuccessful – AOL bought Bebo in 2006 for $850 million. Awkward.

However, there are some glimmers of hope for AOL. In 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported AOL had seen its first quarterly growth figures in 8 years as it tried to push its way into the online advertising arena. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion in cash. A monumental fall from $226 billion grace.

The decline of AOL can ultimately be put down to similar factors to IBM. The key, according to Christina Warren, was the arrival of broadband. This technological advancement meant that faster internet was available – plus, it got rid of the whole modem screeching thing, which I still believe should be given more credit than it normally is.

With AOL no longer being the only route into the internet for so many customers, the market opened up and consumers had more choices presented to them. AOL’s dominance and focus on being an ISP rather than a provider of consumer services meant small competitors were able to step in and sweep up new users.

The agile customer facing companies who focused on providing search and mail capabilities had a field day. AOL lost significant market share to both Google and Yahoo, leaving the two to fight it out amongst themselves for the advantage.

Which brings us to an interesting question. We’ve seen some examples so far of why monopolistic companies fail, but not clear examples of how other companies step in to take their place.

Wookey attached Salesforce’s successes to modern software practices – iterations and regular deployment, customer facing attitude, and a focus on flexibility. But much of these philosophies can be tracked back to the post-AOL fight for the internet.

How did Google beat Yahoo and what can we learn from this?

Mohit Aron, an ex-Google employee writing for TechCrunch, looks at the technological infrastructure behind the two companies to give an insight into considerations you have to make within a business to be able to manage scalability is an effective manner.

Yahoo’s system was based on NetApp filers, a third party system which allowed them to expand rapidly – adding new features and meeting customer demand. Alternatively, Google started work on what came to be known as the Google File System. This was an internal project to define the infrastructure of the company and have a solid base to work from.

The results of these differences were that Yahoo was able to meet immediate demand faster and expand rapidly, but that its services were less stable and reliant increasingly on third parties – which became expensive the more expansion occurred. Google, on the other hand, had to be a little slower in releasing new features at first, but this forced them to hone and refine the core features they did have. Then, once the architecture was in place, Google was able to accelerate forward and release more features more quickly than Yahoo with lower relative overhead costs and greater stability through the consistency across the company.

According to Aron:

I believe the lessons here extend beyond infrastructure or application engineering, and offer insight into what it takes to build a sustainable business. It speaks directly to one of the most important things I’ve learned from my time at Google: the need to completely understand the problem before even considering the solution.

It was Google’s long term vision and understanding of what they needed to do which gave them the advantage over Yahoo. The greater infrastructure is merely a symptom of that difference. One could say the classic UX and UI of Google is a symptom of that too. There was a clarity surrounding Google.

So, AOL lost out because they were on the wrong end of a technological shift. Their market dominance proved largely meaningless once the area changed.

New companies were able to exploit this niche by being agile and riding the technological wave.

The company which exploited this most of all was Google, as it had a clear sense of direction and implemented long-term planning from the outset.

The pros and cons of monopolies; pass Go, receive $200?

Monopolies are not necessarily 100% bad in and of themselves.

When a firm like Facebook comes to a position of dominance so quickly, it is quite clear that they are offering a service which solves a problem for the user; it adds clear value.

However, the long-term effects of monopolies, almost regardless of how we might personally feel about the specific company in question, are often negative. Though, they can have positives too.

Leonard E. Read, writing for The Atlantic in 1924 and published now for the FEE lays out some of the typical considerations of monopolies and their effects on the market and the consumers.

There are two ways to attain an exclusive position in the market, that is to say, there are two ways to achieve monopoly. One way is not only harmless—indeed, it is beneficial; the other is bad. The beneficial way is to become su­perior to everyone else in provid­ing some good or service. The bad way is to use coercive force to keep others from competing effec­tively and also from challenging one’s position. Rise above others by excellence, or hold others down by coercive force!

Consider my Facebook example given above. I credit Facebook with gaining dominance by providing a good service, but I overlook their expanded market share which is partly due to the acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp. These business tactics are not somehow avoided in the world of tech; businesses act like businesses even if the CEO wears a t-shirt.

Reaching a dominant market position large enough to be considered monopolistic simply through providing a better service than competitors doesn’t have too many immediate concerns attached to it. However, as companies grow and mature they don’t always stay exactly the same. We shouldn’t trust in a company to act nicely simply because we like their product. Their motivations will be business ones like any other.

Mark Thoma, reporting on Google’s negotiations with European regulators in 2014 for CBS’s Moneywatch, writes:

When firms have such power, they charge prices that are higher than can be justified based upon the costs of production, prices that are higher than they would be if the market was more competitive. With higher prices, consumers will demand less quantity, and hence the quantity produced and consumed will be lower than it would be under a more competitive market structure.

The bottom line is that when companies have a monopoly, prices are too high and production is too low. There’s an inefficient allocation of resources.

These simple economic stances generally ring true whether the company in question is a big data tech giant or a trading company with its own private army. Monopolies are generally not good for the consumer, even though they can present benefits.

One could take a narrative view of this, given our historical approach, and suggest that individual moments of monopoly are bad for the consumer but the continual competition and rise-and-falls creates a long term process which can prove beneficial.

Maybe a monopoly is not too bad as long as there’s a chance it can fail?

You can make your own mind up.

Innovation, disruption, and you

If there is a chance a monopoly can fail then it is reliant on some form innovation or disruption as we’ve seen from our historical examples. Who will rise up next is largely defined by their relation to these factors also.

Ex-Paypal and now Palantir head honcho Peter Theil has stated that he doesn’t like the use of the term disruption, stating:

Disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything trendy and new. This seemingly trivial fad matters because it distorts an entrepreneur’s self-understanding in an inherently competitive way

For Theil, a product shouldn’t simply be cheaper than its competitor, possibly through some shady business practice or “innovative” business model – however you wish to phrase it. Companies which become monopolies have to start off with something which holds true to the original feeling around the word disruption.

They must identify a need which isn’t being served or a need which could be served in a better way, not simply cheaper. For Thiel, that is the cornerstone of innovation and that is what you must start with to build a monopoly.

Because, arguably, the only way to really beat monopolies is to build them.

Counterintuitive, I know.

Peter Thiel has 4 key takeways to consider to try to build a mini-monopoly for your niche:

1. Start small and focus on the niche of your niche. Really focus your concept and your direction to do something really well.
2. Gradually grow by expanding your services and options one by one through iterations, like how Amazon added CDs alongside books.
3. Going head-to-head with competitors is not always recommended – try to do something a bit different and have a real creative difference between the two of you.
4. Have a long term plan and know where you want to be in a few years time. Being the first to market doesn’t guarantee long-term success. As our Google vs Yahoo battle demonstrated.

These monopolies are growing. Should we be worried?

Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu suggests that we shouldn’t be quite as worried about monopolies in the internet age because they can be beaten. One of the defining elements of this is the half life of domination. As Erick Shonfeld put it in 2010:

AT&T ruled for 70 years, Microsoft ruled for maybe 25, so far Google has ruled for 10. Will Facebook rule next, and of so, for how long?

Seven years later and our data in the introduction to this article shows that Facebook is playing a much larger role within the industry than it was previously and has the social element of the industry cornered.

As Tim Wu phrases the argument:

Are today’s internet monopolies really comparable to the info monopolies of other ages, like AT&T, the Hollywood studios, and NBC? Informed by the apostle of creative destruction Joseph Schumpeter, some agree that Internet monopolies are inevitable, but insists also that they are also inherently vulnerable and ephemeral. Just wait and today’s monopolies will be reshaped or destroyed by disruptive market forces. Bing may have had a slow start, but it may still run over Google, and if not, perhaps the rise of mobile Apps will make search engines irrelevant altogether. The theory is based, in part, on an inescapable truth: all things change.

Bing lol.

But there are serious points in here too.

• The barriers to entry within digital technologies are lower than at any point in the past, particularly relative to attainable market reach.
• Major technological shifts and advancements are occurring at shorter intervals. What if virtual or augmented reality accelerates in the next decade and suddenly a whole new market opens up which new firms find success in?

It’s difficult. The Economist published an article in May 2017 arguing for greater anti-Trust rules regarding tech giants. The article postulates that data is the new oil. But it comes to a worrying conclusion. That the expanding nature of networks adds to the overall amount of available data isn’t a new idea, but when viewed through the prism of monopolies it makes for very sobering reading.

If Google or Facebook are able to gather more data by orders of magnitude than their competitors while also holding on to the users through usage and engagement with their products, their ability to advertise and do so effectively and cheaply destroys competitors within the field. Every step ahead of the competition accelerates their advantage; like the Amazon Flywheel concept we’ve discussed before in our article on the delivery process.

As such, the Economist argue for authorities to take into consideration more than just company size when assessing mergers, to take into consideration the data assets held by each company. They argue, for instance, that Facebook’s willingness to pay $19 billion for Whatsapp despite a lack of revenue should have been a major red flag.

The second measure the Economist argue for is greater transparency of data. This could be as simple as allowing consumers to see what data is held, how it’s used, and how much money is being made from it. Or, it could be the more radical solution of beginning to see data as a public utility and having a shared collection of data which companies can use and draw from – subject to guidelines and such.

The initial suggestion is a classic step to stop monopolies and simply reflects an updating of traditional systems. The discussions about data management, however, provide a lot more to reflect on and imagine. The designation of data as a public utility would destroy the systemic monopolistic advantage of the Facebooks and Googles of now and in the future.

Games of Monopoly come to an end, even if it feels like forever

Our best way to challenge these monopolies then is to encourage startups to become better, be prepared to break new technological boundaries and to consider how legislation can impact on the way monopolies are formed and perpetuate.

If I’m putting my free-market hat on, I’d be advocating for greater competition to disrupt this concentration of power and market share.

But also, it’s needed to keep pushing and supporting those infrastructural elements which enable startups to form and to emerge in the market as potential players. As Paul Graham makes clear, it isn’t a coincidence that Silicon Valley has been a continual producer of top tech firms. An environment has been constructed there which is beneficial for the growth of companies – particularly those which aim to do something different. In doing so, this draws the right people necessary to come together, mix, and give birth to exciting new concepts and products.

From educational systems to government investment schemes, there is a range of things which can help lay down the grounding upon which these environments can grow and flourish.

Monopolies aren’t bad in and of themselves. But if monopolies don’t come to and end then it’s a sign of a lack of innovation, growth, and progress.

Someone will end their dominance. Could it be you?

What do you think about Facebook and Google’s current dominance? Is it long term, or is there a technological change around the corner which is going to unseat them?

geralt / Pixabay

Sales promotion is a type of “Pull marketing” technique. If you have a product which is new in the market or which is not receiving a lot of attention, then you can promote this product to customers via sales promotions. You can use various techniques like giving discounts on the product or offering 1 + 1 free schemes.

In short, sales promotion is the process of persuading a potential customer to buy the product.

Sales promotion is designed to be used as a short-term tactic to boost sales – it is rarely suitable as a method of building long-term customer loyalty. Some sales promotions are aimed at consumers. Others are targeted at intermediaries and at the firm’s sales force.

The American Marketing Association (AMA), in its Web-based “Dictionary of Marketing Terms,” defines sales promotion as “media and nonmedia marketing pressure applied for a predetermined, limited period of time in order to stimulate trial, increase consumer demand, or improve product availability.”

There are surely a lot of benefits a business can gain by using Sales Promotion strategies. Here are some of the most beneficial ones.

1. Luring New Customers with Price

By offering a reduced price on a popular item, you can lure customers away from competitors, which may ultimately help turn them into regular shoppers.

Example: If you own a small electronics store that’s competing with a large retailer, offer a discounted price on a popular cell phone model for a limited time. If you serve the customers well during the purchase process, they may be willing to come back.

2. Gaining Community Favor

Create a good name for your business by staging a promotion that supports a worthy cause.

Example: If your town needs a new fire engine or police car, donate a portion of customer purchases at your business to the cause. You’ll be helping your community, which is a win-win for everyone and may lead to more business for you.

3. Encourage Repeat Purchases

Businesses like airlines and hotels successfully use rewards programs to encourage customer loyalty, and you can do the same for your small business.

Example: If you own a coffee shop, for instance, give customers a rewards card that you hole-punch each time they make a purchase. After they make five or 10 purchases, they can redeem the card for a free cup of coffee. This is done by one of the most well-known coffee shop in the world — Starbucks.

4. Entice Reluctant Consumers

Giving away free products or services is a good way to get people to try them for the first time, which may lead to a purchase.

Example: If you own a deli and you’ve added a new sandwich to the menu, pass out small samples to each of your customers as they come in the door. If you operate a health club, offer a free trial membership or free personal training sessions to get people to give you a try.

5. Providing Information

A sales promotion can help you provide information to potential customers that aids them in making a decision. This can be beneficial for products or services that are complicated or are unfamiliar to consumers.

Example: If you’re a financial planner and you’re attempting to gain clients in the area of retirement planning, a free seminar allows you to explain what you do and how some of your investment products work.

Promotions, when done well, are an effective way for you to market your business or products and services.

I’m not talking about promotions where you drop the prices on your existing products significantly, or when you have a blowout sale to move stale inventory. Instead, I mean a well-planned, seasonally relevant focus on themes or solutions wrapped around your products that your customers will take note of and value and that prospects will be enticed to try for the first time.

Learn more about the best words to use during sales promotions here

In general, there are two types of Sales Promotion — consumer and trade.

1. Consumer Sales Promotion

Any sales promotion activity that you do keeping the end consumer in mind is known as consumer sales promotions. Example – if an E-commerce website gives 10% discount on its products, then it wants the consumers to make the best of this deal. This is a consumer focused promotional activity and hence can be called as consumer sales promotions.

The objective of Consumer sales promotions might be various. A consumer might be asked to test a sample of a completely new perfume in the market and rate it. An existing customer might be asked to use a Scratch card so that he receives a gift.

At the end, the result should be an action from the consumer. Either the consumer should purchase the product right away, or he should come to know about the product so that further awareness is created for the brand.

2. Trade Sales Promotion

If your promotional activities are focused on Dealers, distributors or agents, then it is known as trade promotions. There is a lot of competition in any field. And in channel sales, to get the products moving and to motivate the dealer to perform better, trade discounts are given.

There are other types of trade sales promotions which can be used to motivate the dealer and distributor. More such techniques of sales promotions are discussed below.

As the noise of competitors rises, you will find more and more companies using sales promotions techniques. The advantage of sales promotion is that they are not too expensive for the company when compared with ATL advertising mediums like Television or newspaper. Hence, even small businesses use it quite effectively.

If you want your sales promotion to be effective and gain positive results, follow these three important steps:

1. Target your effort

Promotions can spur purchases by established customers, reel in new customers, draw customers from competitors, get current customers to buy differently, and stimulate business during slow periods. But rarely can one promotion accomplish all of those objectives at once.

2. Plan your incentive

A well-thought-out, properly targeted promotion prompts customers to take action by offering the appropriate incentives.

3. Know what you want to achieve

Promotions work especially well when consumers are in need of a jolt to take buying action. Just be clear about what you want to achieve. Set the number of sales you want to ring up, dollars you want to bring in, customer names you want to collect, buying patterns you want to change, or any other objective you want your promotion to achieve. Then determine what your desired change will mean financially to your business.

Each and every business is different and therefore, the type of sales promotion used by each business needs to be different.

Being a competitive world, most companies use a combination of various sales promotional methods to defeat competitors, attract and retain customers and most importantly, to increase the sale of their products or services.

geralt / Pixabay

The goal of a sales email is to start a conversation.

You want to pique enough interest, and show enough value, that you get the reader to hit “reply.”

But when you sit down to write a cold email, more often than not, you don’t know what to say. And while cold email isn’t nearly as uncomfortable as cold calling, chances are you feel a little weird showing up in someone’s inbox unannounced, trying to convince them you’re worth their time.

So, oftentimes, you might resort to being polite and using pleasantries such as, “I hope this messages finds you well,” or “How are you?” to try to make yourself feel less uncomfortable.

The thing is, being too polite in a cold email actually hurts your chance of getting a response. In addition to wasting your reader’s valuable time, politeness is an automatic signal that you’re selling something.

Have you ever heard the saying, “No one likes to be sold to, but everyone likes to buy?” As soon as your reader realizes you’re trying to sell them something, you’ve lost them. Which is why it’s so important to focus your tone and content on “adding value” instead of “selling.”

1. Don’t Be Polite, Be Considerate

While polite language may impress your grandmother’s friends at the dinner table, in email it’s a tell-tale sign you want something from your reader.

Take a moment to imagine you have a terrible headache, are in a rush, and want to purchase some Advil. When you make it into a drug store, the first sales associate you see asks, “Hi, how are you today?” and proceeds to tell you about a special deal they have going on. The result? You escape that one-way conversation as quickly as possible.

Another sales associate then sees you reading the aisle signs, walks over to you, and says, “Hey, can I help you find something?”

While the first sales associate is outwardly polite, she actually comes across as intrusive and caring more about her sales goals than your needs. In contrast, by asking a question in response to your behavior, the second sales associate shows greater empathy and is genuinely helpful.

How can you be like the second sales associate in your emails?

Let’s say you provide a service that helps companies identify and fix software bugs faster. Instead of using several paragraphs to explain who you are, why you’re reaching out, and even what your service is, focus on the benefits you can provide.

You might start off by saying, “Hi Joe, How often does your team struggle to find bugs in your code quickly?” This grabs the reader’s attention by immediately expressing value.

2. Eliminate the Filler

While filler does nothing but take up space and waste time, direct language exudes professionalism and efficiency and is more likely to inspire replies.

Since it can feel a little uncomfortable to jump right in, one way to make things feel more natural is to use “humble confidence.” Rather than relying on polite filler phrases, focus on your prospects’ needs and desires. In other words, make the email about them, not about you.

Be confident by expressing the real value of your product or service clearly and directly. Be willing to go for it. Be bold. Don’t do this with grand claims, but by utilizing specific social proof, like: “I helped [company1] and [company2] increase their email response rates by 75 percent using a similar strategy.”

3. Write to a Human Being

Think about the great conversations you’ve had that have led to meaningful connections. Do they stand out because the other person was very polite? Or because they were interesting, or somehow added value to your life?

Remember those conversations and interactions when you write your next cold email. At the end of the day, you’re connecting with a person, and you want to inspire a response from them.

Instead of trying to soften the blow of emailing a stranger with, “I hope this finds you well,” and other overly polite language, show you have something interesting to offer. Also, use a tone that’s conversational and easy to connect with.

Imagine you’re selling a project management tool that uses gamification to increase team efficiency. You’re meeting an ideal prospect for the first time and you only have a few minutes of their time. What would you say to pique their curiosity so they want to learn more?

You could say something like, “I have a tip about how you can streamline team communication and ramp efficiency while improving team morale.“

4. Put It Into Practice

With a little willingness to check politeness at the door, it’s not hard to craft powerful emails. You don’t have to be a professional writer. You just have to understand the true value of your product or service and communicate that value clearly and succinctly.

Think about what’s important to your target customer and how your product addresses that.

Try writing a list of high-level benefits without using industry-specific terms or complex technical language. From there, generate one or two powerful sentences that express your highest-level value in as few words as possible. You can now use these sentences as the basis of your emails.

All of a sudden, you’ve got something that pops, is easy to read, and clearly adds value. That’s what you need to start a conversation.

There are many ways to put data to work, and companies, and especially their leaders, are advised to explore as many of them as they can. Each presents distinct opportunities for profit and competitive advantage, from product improvements to new revenue streams to possible industry game changers. At the same time, each presents challenges that must be experienced to be appreciated.

While big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things garner the lion’s share of media attention, using data to its full potential is much more about management than it is about technology. A team of data scientists may employ a series of clever analyses to yield an important insight, but that insight will die on the vine if others in the organization don’t carry it forward by developing a deeper understanding of the implications, making a critical decision, building it into a product, or leveraging it in interactions with customers. Putting data to work includes the whole sequence, from data to insight to profit.

Insight Center

In working with companies on getting more from their data, I advise managers to explore seven methods to put data to work. I also urge all leaders to initiate department- or business unit–size trials of all these methods, so they can learn how the options work and which would be best for their business.

• Make better decisions. First, use better (more relevant, more accurate) data when making decisions, up and down the organization chart. I’ve not worked with or heard of a company that didn’t freely admit that it needed to make better decisions — and many push hard to improve. But incorporating more and better data into decision making can be difficult. You must learn to understand variation, to combine data from different sources, and to drive decision making to the lowest possible level. By taking the time to learn these skills, though, you can use data to reduce uncertainty, increasing the chances of making sound decisions.
• Innovate products, services, and processes. Use data to uncover hidden insights, and use those insights to create or improve products, services, and processes. For example, at Morgan Stanley, Jeff McMillan and his team aim to improve working relationships with their wealth management clients by analyzing everything from client goals and portfolios to available investment products to email. An algorithm then takes this information and suggests actions, at which point advisors choose the best ones to suggest to their clients. McMillan encourages advisors to “imagine you have a conversation at 6:00 PM every evening with a Harvard MBA with 800 years’ experience. You tell her what you’re thinking about, and she thinks through your clients’ opportunities all night long. In the morning, she presents you with a list of your 10 best actions for the day. Wouldn’t that help you make your clients happier?” Their goal is to develop personalized strategies for each client based on far more data and analytic horsepower than any financial adviser could marshal alone.
• Informationalize products, services and processes. Build more data into what you offer customers, so you make existing products more valuable. Automobile manufacturers have a history of working on this by adding warning lights, GPS, distance-to-empty gas tank notifications, and other features almost seamlessly. I’ve yet to run across a product or process that wouldn’t benefit from more data.
• Improve quality, eliminate costs, and build trust. Proactively address quality by finding and eliminating the root causes of errors. Virtually everything a company does, from delivering products to running the place, uses enormous quantities of data. But bad data makes this work more difficult and increases costs — up to 20% of revenue! You can’t expect someone to factor data they don’t trust into an important decision. Take steps to actively track down data quality issues and eliminate their root causes.
• Provide content. Sell or license new, richer, or more targeted data. All customers depend on content, and thousands of companies, such as Bloomberg and 23andMe, aim to fill the need. Still, most companies don’t think much about selling their data. But doing so can provide great opportunity. For example, car insurance companies discovered a relatively simple piece of data they could sell: the number of new policies written each day. New car sales reflect the health of automobile manufacturers and are of great interest to investors. But manufacturers release sales figures monthly — an eternity for investors. Since each sale requires a new insurance policy, the number of new policies issued each day provides a faster indicator. This becomes a profit stream for the issuers and for Quandl, which aggregates this data across the industry and packages it for investors.
• Infomediate. Connect data providers and those who need the data. Here, the goal is not to provide content but to provide direction toward content. Google is, of course, the best-known example, but Quora, too, helps people find answers when expert help is needed. And there is huge opportunity here for others. In both their personal and professional lives, individuals spend hours each week looking for documents, reports, and other data. Find ways to connect these individuals with others who can provide the answers they’re looking for.
• Exploit asymmetries. An asymmetry arises when one side of a transaction knows something that the other doesn’t. Exploiting this knowledge helps them drive a better deal. Hedge funds and used car dealers use such data to create and leverage asymmetries. More recently, sports venues, airlines, and others have begun using variable pricing to capture maximum revenue from consumers. All companies can examine sales and related data more deeply in search of such opportunities. Conversely, closing asymmetries, as Carfax does for used cars, can also present great opportunities.

Each of these seven options can help your company put data to work, and in many cases a combination of these approaches can create incredible value. For example, Liz Kirscher, head of talent acquisition at Morningstar, and her team are rethinking their hiring process, looking more closely at existing data, incorporating new data, and bringing more discipline throughout. Important prongs of Kirscher’s approach include innovating by using artificial intelligence to better screen resumes; informationalizing by using the Hogan score to better understand “grit” (a predictor of success at Morningstar); and making better decisions, bringing greater transparency to the measurement of hiring success and failure.

As you explore these approaches, you’ll find that some work better or provide greater value than others. You may discover, for instance, that your decision making improves with more data (especially once you’ve fixed some underlying quality issues), but that selling customer data goes against your company values. Or that it’s relatively easy to make incremental improvements to products through informationalization, but you don’t yet have the right talent for larger innovation initiatives. Test options and learn quickly! And as you do, crystallize those ways of putting data to work that create the most value and profit for your company, and implement them in your long-term data strategy.

A decade ago, Kaiser Permanente installed the nation’s most comprehensive electronic health record (EHR). The decision was made by the health plan and medical group together. Due to the large size of our organization, implementation was challenging and expensive: The process took two years, and the cost at the time was estimated to be around $4 billion. But there is no question that the price tag and the effort required to train and motivate physicians and staff were worth it. The information the EHR provided, combined with our data analytics and integrated medical care delivery system, has helped us save countless lives.

Across the United States, few physicians have access to a comprehensive EHR that contains all of a patient’s medical information (regardless of how many doctors have provided care) and communicates care gaps and potential medical errors before they happen. As difficult and expensive as it may be to integrate this kind of system across a community, doing so is the best way to maximize quality of care for all patients. For health systems that want to make the investments in time and capital needed, here are some important lessons our experience taught us.

Make the EHR Comprehensive

In the late 1990s, and again in the early 2000s, we tried to design and build our own EHR. Both efforts failed, costing us close to a billion dollars each time. A major issue was the approach we used: To gain physician acceptance, we tried to accommodate the unique preferences of every specialty. For example, rather than having a single diagram of the body that every clinician would use to document the location of a patient’s problem, ophthalmology had its own diagram focused on the eye, while ENT had a different one for the face. As a result, a primary care physician had to review and incorporate two sets of data, sometimes with contradicting information, for a single problem.

Insight Center

After two failures, we made the decision to purchase a single system, EPIC, whose philosophy was not to customize the applications but to maximize the combined functionality of the system for all. In addition, we worked with the company to develop an in-patient suite fully integrated with the outpatient modules.

There will always be customized applications that are more desired by a single specialty and more specific to its practice, but the power of the EHR derives from the totality of the information it provides. Patients benefit the most through the sharing of information across specialties, rather than the depth or ease of documentation within each. Unlike many office-based stand-alone systems that focus on a single clinician’s needs, a comprehensive EHR begins with the totality of the patient, and communicates their information to every physician who provides care.

When the same data is presented to all physicians, they can spot and address any gaps, regardless of whether they work in a primary or specialty department. For example, consider high blood pressure, the most common cause of an ischemic stroke, as a quality measure. According to the CDC, it is controlled across the country only 55% of the time. In contrast, in The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG), success is achieved 90% of the time. The reason is that every physician is aware when a patient has this problem, and they can communicate easily to clinical colleagues when additional therapy is needed.

Get Physicians Onboard

Outside of large multispecialty medical groups that are paid on a capitated basis, one of the biggest challenges with EHR adoption is convincing physicians of its value. Many of the current EHRs were designed predominantly for coding and billing, rather than clinical practice, and they often don’t connect seamlessly with the EHRs in surrounding doctors’ offices. So rather than making patient care easier, they end up slowing clinicians down.

Our experience inside TPMG has been different. While our physicians found entering data into the EHR cumbersome, they could also immediately see the advantages for their patients. Rather than having to wait for a patient’s records to arrive from their colleagues’ offices, they could access the information immediately. Instead of having to search for radiologic studies, they could access the studies as soon as they were complete. And instead of having to mail medical information to other physicians about next steps in the treatment process, they knew it would arrive immediately; as a result, they could be confident their patient would not fall through the cracks.

Like other doctors, our physicians worried about the added time required to learn the new system. So we reduced their schedules by half during the implementation phase. They had to learn how to use the computers most efficiently, with some having to first master basic skills like typing. But physician acceptance was relatively easy to achieve because all physicians saw the advantages right away. Unfortunately, for most doctors in small community offices, the fragmented nature of community practice and the lack of a single medical record make this harder to achieve.

Build Trust

Major operational change is always difficult, so unless physicians trust their leaders, they will resist it. As CEO of TPMG at the time, I knew that in order to earn physician trust, I had to personally lead the process. I drove to each of our 20 medical centers and met with thousands of physicians across Northern California. I explained how the EHR would improve clinical outcomes, how the additional time required for data entry would be offset by not having to wait for information and results, and how the system would help them avoid dangerous medication or medical errors.

Don’t Forget About Other Employees Using the System

We also heard concerns from other employees, especially the medical assistants. The EHR would require more work on their part — they’d need to do much more documentation — and they couldn’t foresee the clinical benefits as clearly.

In addition to providing extensive training on the new system, we launched a program called “I Saved a Life,” aimed to change how medical assistants interact with patients. When patients came to the office, rather than just asking them the reason for their visit and documenting vital signs, the medical assistants were expected to use the EHR to look for gaps in preventive care, and when appropriate for their level of training, address them. This often meant scheduling a mammogram in radiology if the person had not had one in two years, or giving the person a colon cancer identification kit when the computer indicated they needed it. Or, for example, when a woman was overdue for cervical cancer screening, they called OB/GYN and scheduled an appointment. The department threw a celebration when any of these interventions identified a cancer, as a way to recognize the contribution the medical assistant had made. Soon, rather than staff seeing the EHR as a burden, they wanted to use the new system to save a life.

Provide Ongoing Technical Support Throughout

When using a new technology, people want to know that they will be supported and protected should anything go wrong. To do that, we provided immediate, on-site technical support. We knew that it was one thing to use the system during preparatory training classes and another to use it in a live setting. In the initial weeks of going live in a particular department or medical center, physicians who had already implemented the application successfully in another location would act as consulting experts, making themselves available to their physician colleagues. Finally, we invested in additional IT staff to provide consultative support for months following implementation.

Implementation of an EHR needs to be thought of like any capital program: You invest heavily at the front and achieve the return on investment over time. A decade after implementation, the EHR allows our physicians to treat patients in offices, hospitals, and emergency departments more rapidly than in the past. It has helped Kaiser Permanente in Northern California become the only program in the country with a five-star ranking by the National Committee for Quality Assurance for both Medicare and commercial members. The comprehensiveness of the data continues to facilitate our data analytic work, our evolution of best practices, and our efforts to help patients avoid complications from chronic disease.

Practicing the best medical care in the 21st century is not possible without a comprehensive EHR. Advances in health care, including precision medicine, genomics, and artificial intelligence, will require universal access to these powerful computer systems. For many doctors in community practice today, the changes needed will be difficult. Investments will need to be made in hardware, software and training, and connecting the systems of different offices. Workflows will need to be modified and standardized. Hopefully, these lessons will facilitate the transition process for others and provide confidence that, over time, the advantages for patients will make the efforts worthwhile.

Lalmch / Pixabay

We’re almost through the 14 principles of lean manufacturing that underlie the Toyota Production System (TPS). If you haven’t read the three preceding articles, you may find them helpful: What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, Part 2, and Part 3.

So far we’ve looked at the Philosophy of TPS, which provides the foundation for everything. It’s interesting, while these 4 philosophies are the foundation for the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing, they have nothing do do with manufacturing. They are sound business practices. Supporting the 4 philosophies are the 14 principles. We’ve completed the first 9, today we’ll wrap up the remaining 5 principles.

Principle 10: Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy. It’s become clear that TPS is a very people focused process. So often we think of lean manufacturing as representing the ultimate in factory automation and technology utilization. But the developers of TPS recognized that people are at the core of making any of this work. Principle 9 focused on the leadership roles. Principle 10 extends this to the entire team. It recognizes the importance of several things in driving the highest levels of performance: You have to get the right people, you have to develop them to achieve the highest levels of performance, and it’s critical they be aligned with the culture and values of the organization.

It’s easy to see how this principle applies directly to building the strongest teams of marketing and sales professionals. But too often we overlook elements of these–as a result, we aren’t optimizing our ability to market and sell. We can see, if we don’t execute this principle well, it has adverse impacts on many of the other principles, ultimately creating problems or challenges in achieving our goals.

Principle 11: Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them to improve. This is very important for sales and marketing. If you go back to principles 2 and 3 (create continuous flow, use pull systems), TPS basically linked very complex series of process steps dependent on each other. The station downstream of your work station was your customer. You produced your work based on the your customer’s need or pull. Your goal was to provide a defect free product to them, so they in turn could add their value providing a defect free product to the next station, and so on to the ultimate customer. Likewise, you are the customer to the station upstream from yours. Their job was to respond to your demand (pull) and provide a defect free product to you.

You can trace these steps all the way back to the beginning of the manufacturing line. But it didn’t stop there–where did the inputs come from? They could have come from outside suppliers, they could have come from other parts of the company. As a result, to optimize the production systems, there is a huge dependency on the extended network of partners and suppliers to be doing their jobs with the same level of quality, at the same cadence as the production line. Without close planning and cooperation with this extended network, huge problems or inefficiencies arise.

In Japan, huge, very closely connected supplier networks have been established to help facilitate this tight collaboration. You may have heard of the Keiretsu.

We face the same in sales and marketing. In sales, we may have channel partners, downstream of us, working with customers. If we aren’t working effectively with them, we can never serve the customer effectively.

Likewise, sales, customer services, and other functions within our organizations represent part of the “partner” network. If we aren’t collaborating and working effectively together, we will fail to achieve our objectives. There are some interesting words in this principle that are massively important if we really want to make this work. The principle is based on mutual respect of each other. It’s based on challenging each other to improve and helping each other to improve. All to a common goal of serving the end customer.

As we reflect on many of the problems we have with performance, we can trace many of these back to the failure to apply this principles to our work with other organizations–within our company and outside our company.

Principle 12: Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation. I’m envious of this principle. It was developed by people focused on building fantastic manufacturing capability. But this principle is fundamental to sales and marketing!

Think about it. At it’s core, it’s about customer centricity. If we aren’t spending time with our customers, we can’t possibly understand what they are trying to achieve and how we help them solve their problems (remember from principle 11 they are part of our extended network).

It’s a core leadership principle as well, we can’t manage by sitting behind a desk looking at dashboards or in meetings. We have to be with our people to understand what they are doing and where they need help. If you reflect back to the discussion of principle 7, using visual controls, we have dashboards that tell us how things are doing and alerting us to problems. But when a the line stops and the red light is flashing at a workstation (visual control), managers, experts and others on the line gathered at that workstation to understand what the problem was –where the problem was occurring.

Likewise, if we want to understand the challenges our people have in performing, while our dashboards may alert us to those challenges, the only way we solve this is with our people.

Principle 13: Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options. Implement decisions rapidly. In the ready, fire, aim culture of sales and marketing, this principle may seem way out of line. To those of you who have studied agile or are disciples of Eric Ries’ work, this may seem incompatible (it isn’t, but that’s another blog series

But on reflection we can see the value of this–even at individual levels. For example, if we rush to meet with the customer and we aren’t prepared, we know the problems that are created. We know the value of planning, researching, and preparing, so we can maximize our impact in each meeting with the customer.

Likewise, when we look at our organizations, too often, we get into panic mode if we aren’t making our numbers. Frenzies of unfocused activity happen. We may create edicts around activity levels, “just make more calls, just send more emails, just get more stuff into the pipeline.” But usually this has a terrible impact on results.

We already know this principle is so critical to everything we do in marketing and sales, yet we struggle to restrain ourselves, taking the time to understand, analyze, prepare before we execute.

Principle 14: Become a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement. In building high performing manufacturing systems, the creators of TPS recognized things were always changing and to be able to respond to those changes, the entire organization needed to continually learn and improve.

In marketing and sales it’s even more visible and more urgent to adopt this principle. Our customers are constantly changing, they buy differently today than they did a few years ago. Our competition is changing–both traditional competition, and those new competitors who are disrupting our customers and businesses.

If we aren’t learning and improving, we will be left behind.

Conclusion: We’ve completed the 4 philosophies, and the 14 principles of the Toyota Production System. As you can see, they are not really about manufacturing, but about developing high performance organizations. The applications of most of these in sales and marketing are immediately obvious.

What leaps out at me is the disciplined process focused orientation—we know how important that is in sales and marketing. The visible metrics and problem solving approach. The dependency on upstream and downstream partners, collaborating to optimize the results we produce. The focus on learning and improvement.

But more than anything else, it’s the focus on people. The creators of TPS recognized all of this only works with knowledgeable, empowered people at all levels-all aligned around the company goals and culture. Leaders are teachers, coaches, developers, and collaborative problem solvers.

In my next and final post on the series, I’ll address what I think are some of the “misunderstandings” of applying lean manufacturing to sales and marketing. Mostly, it’s people who have focused on only one aspect or element of manufacturing, for example “build to order,” or “specialization.”

As the creators of TPS recognized, it’s the disciplined execution of all the philosophies and principles that drove manufacturing excellence. Likewise with sales and marketing, it’s the disciplined execution of the same philosophies and principles that enable us to perform at the highest levels.

Unsplash / Pixabay

Content marketing is sometimes described as the art of selling without selling. That is, content marketing is meant to facilitate conversions in a way that is decidedly non-salesy; the focus is always supposed to be on providing real value (not hard sales pitches) to the consumer, but doing so in a way that ultimately helps your bottom line.

This is not an easy balance to strike. Take your company blog, for instance. You can probably understand why it’s not a good idea to make each post a straightforward advertisement for one of your products or services: Simply put, it wouldn’t be very engaging, and not many people would read it. On the flipside, if you write blog posts without ever even mentioning your products and services, you may fear that the blog won’t have any practical effect on your sales.

So how can you write company blog posts that sell without coming across as too confrontational, too over-the-top, or too aggressive? We have some tips for you.

Write Blogs That Sell (Without Being Salesy)

Always focus on your audience. The guiding question of each post should be, “What’s in it for my audience?” Write to provide value not just to your brand but to your readers. Make sure your topics and your takeaway points are relevant to the people you’re targeting with your blog.

Give away valuable information. In keeping with the point above, make your blog a place where you give away expertise that your customers can use. Don’t hesitate to give away your “secret weapons” and your tried-and-true practices. This is how you build trust in your own expertise—by being confident enough to give it away.

Don’t write about yourself. Your posts don’t actually need to be about your brand. In fact, to keep them relevant to your readers, it’s probably smarter to write about your industry more broadly, or about the way your trade/profession brings value to consumers.

Don’t mention your brand in every sentence. Your blog can absolutely mention your company name—in fact, we recommend it—but a couple of mentions is probably fine, perhaps in the call to action at the article’s end. Too many mentions of your brand will definitely cause the post to read as “salesy.”

Maintain a conversational tone. Read your blog post out loud, and simply ask yourself: Does it sound like something you’d say in real life? If not, you may want to modify it a bit so that it’s less formal.

Include a CTA. By writing blog posts that earn credibility through giving away free and valuable information, you create the opportunity to end your post with a strong sales pitch—just a sentence or two inviting your reader to contact you for further value.

With a plethora of digital platforms that people use these days, there is an ongoing pressure among marketers to be available on every platform to maximize their online reach. However, many have misinterpreted the increased need to adopt online platforms to rely solely on social media, discounting the value of one of most essential digital marketing tactics known which is email marketing.

According to statistics, there are more than 4.3 billion users of email worldwide, a user base which can rival that of social media. While social media definitely has its own strengths, email has unique characteristics that make it a more effective marketing tool, particularly for B2B marketers.

In a business setting, rarely do businesses communicate with each other, especially if it’s about sales, through informal channels such as Facebook Messenger or even on Twitter. On the other hand, despite email being older than social media, it is still the most preferred communication medium among 86% of professionals today. It is more formal, transactional, and personal way to reach out to your prospects. Furthermore, sending an email to your prospects provides maximum exposure to your brand, compared to social media where your promotional messages and post gets constantly buried under a pile of competing posts from other brands.

However, having a viable email list is not easy to achieve. It takes a bit more effort and trust from the target users before they provide their email address to your company. That said, a significant and reliable email list must be established first so that the campaign can generate positive results for your business.

To help you out, here are the key main points from the infographic from Digital Marketing Philippines which list down seven most effective tactics that can surely help marketers and business owners grow their email list in 2017.

1. Social Media Advertising.
2. Content Marketing
3. Search Engine Optimization
4. Social Login/Signup
5. Contest and Giveaways
6. Co-marketing/Partnerships
7. Paid Search/Remarketing

To learn more about how these tactics can help grow your email list, check the infographic below.

Embedded from Digital Marketing Philippines.

geralt / Pixabay

Retaining customers isn’t easy, but it’s important to do for businesses of every size. After all, the sure fire sign of a healthy brand is a growing number of repeat purchases from already existing customers.

The above is a screenshot of BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box ecommerce analytics Customer report. You can clearly see the number of new vs. returning customers. A 50/50 split like the one above is a great place to be for a brand. And you can clearly see this particular brand is heavily focused on increasing returning customer spend.

This is because earn net new customers is expensive. It often takes advertising to acquire –– and if they don’t come back to purchase again, you’re return on ad spend stays steady, rather than increasing over time. It also means your customer lifetime value is low (which decreases how much you will be willing to spend on advertising –– and thus will limit your ad visibility).

Growing your customer lifetime value and building long term customer loyalty takes time, though. It can’t be created overnight.

It also isn’t rocket science.

Earning increased repeat business and building customer lifetime value is doable –– and you can start right now.

First, know that it takes business investment to make LTV a core and measured metric. It must be part of your overall business strategy. This isn’t about a monetary investment. No, you need to invest time in building ways to track and measure your LTV over time.

How 5 Brands Made Customer Lifetime Value a Business Priority

There are many ways to build customer lifetime value, but first, let’s define it to make sure we are all on the same page.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value, commonly referred to as LTV or CLV, is a business metric that estimates the total predictable repeat purchase rate of a customer over the lifetime of their time with your brand.

The higher your brand’s LTV (lifetime value) is, the more valuable it is considered in the market. This is because acquiring net new customers is expensive –– and if a customer only purchases from you once, your return on ad spend (ROAS) doesn’t increase over time.

How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value informs nearly every business decision, but none more than ad and marketing spend.

First, you need to nail down the CLV that will be your north star. There are several ways to do this, but more importantly than which method you go with is consistency once that decision is made (for more on manually calculating CLV, Ometria has an excellent tutorial).

If you are a BigCommerce customer, you can use your Analytics to download and then sort your customers by purchase date.

Easily configure customer lifetime value (LTV) by exporting your customer groups and viewing total spend with your company on a customer cohort level. You can even do it by each individual customer.

Better yet, if you are an Insights customer, you get immediate cohort access to customer LTV in a variety of reports.

BigCommerce Insights offers 6 LTV reports with easily downloadable cohorts you can use to target ads or emails to increase repeat purchasing rates, or find lookalike customers.

If you aren’t using BigCommerce, you can still get at this information by using your store analytics tool to download customer purchase and order history, and then match repeat customers. You may need to build out your own formula or combine multiple sets of data to get at your customer repeat purchase rate.

How to Use CLV — and Why it Matters

CLV (or LTV) should inform nearly every business decision, but none more so than ad spend. The bang you get for your advertising buck is inextricably tied to what you can expect every customer to bring you in the long term — not just their first time purchasing from your store.

When you combine LTV with other metrics like retention rate, customer acquisition cost, churn rate, net profit and ROAS, you start to get a very clear picture of what you can do to improve margins.

A low average ROAS will influence how much you spend on advertising –– likely meaning you won’t be able to afford to bring on net new customers at scale in the long run.

When you spend your business resources on an ad, the goal is to make sure that ad produces as much revenue as possible. Here’s a quick way to calculate ROAS:

Gross Revenue from Ad campaign

ROAS = _______________________

Cost of Ad Campaign

For example, a company that spends $2,000 on an online advertising campaign in a single month. In this month, the campaign results in revenue of $10,000. Therefore, the ROAS is a ratio of 5 to 1 (or 500%) as $10,000 divided by $2,000 = $5.

Revenue: $10,000

Cost: $2000

ROAS = $5 OR 5:1

For every dollar that the company spends on its advertising campaign, it generates $5 worth of revenue.

What is a good ROAS?

An acceptable ROAS is influenced by profit margins, operating expenses, and the overall health of the business.

While there’s no “right” answer, a common ROAS benchmark is a 4:1 ratio — $4 revenue to $1 in ad spend. Cash-strapped start-ups may require higher margins, while online stores committed to growth can afford higher advertising costs.

This is where LTV comes in. The higher your LTV is, the low your ROAS ratio can be for the short-term (understanding that the ratio will increase over time as the customer purchases additional items).

Some businesses require an ROAS of 10:1 in order to stay profitable, and others can grow substantially at just 3:1. A business can only gauge its ROAS goal when it has a defined budget and firm handle on its profit margins.

A large margin means that the business can survive a low ROAS; smaller margins are an indication the business must maintain low advertising costs. An ecommerce store in this situation must achieve a relatively high ROAS to reach profitability. In other words, if you have a low margin, LTV is more important to your business in order to achieve a higher ROAS ratio over time.

Now, let’s take a look at 5 brands who are using S Loyalty, among other tools and tactics, to build customer loyalty and repeat purchases –– two measurements of a healthy LTV.

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1. How to Increase CLV & LTV in a Crowded Online Industry

The Cloud Alchemist is a boutique vapor liquid brand based out of Seattle, WA. They design and produce their own products, from initial design, down to laboratory production.

After speaking with Trevor Taylor, founder of The Cloud Alchemist, I learned that their customer loyalty strategy is all about being personable and connecting with their customers, as demonstrated by how frequently they engage directly with their customers to add value.

“I’ve talked with people about the birth of a new child, buying their first house, and losing jobs.

I gave store credit to a customer who’s hard up, sent spare hard drives to someone building computers for those in need, and even traded a t-shirt in exchange for someone’s home-made jerky.

This is not something you can fake, you have to be genuine, but the response to opening up and being human with customers is immeasurable.”

– Trevor Taylor, Cloud Alchemist

They’re active in their community, participating in Reddit groups, gatherings, Facebook communities, and more. Their team is always transparent about who they work for and where their biases lie. But, getting in front of potential customers as often as possible helps your brand to be seen as a thought leader and a helper –– making that customer’s next purchase decision more likely to be with you.

Here are a few other things The Cloud Alchemist does to increase customer lifetime value.

Send relevant, transparent emails

A big part of being engaging is being relevant.

Being relevant doesn’t mean you have to send an individualized and personalized email to every single customer. Instead, it means that we set up your automation streams to address people by their given name (if your form collects it) and prompts them to take an action relevant to the action they’ve just taken on your site.

For instance, The Cloud Alchemist team emails new customers after a purchase, encouraging them to review the product for the vape community JuiceDB.

JuiceDB is a leading community review site for the vape industry, and The Cloud Alchemist makes it clear to customers that their review –– good or bad –– cannot be altered by their team. Instead, the brand is dedicated to making sure the best flavors have the highest reviews in the community, despite which ones those are.

After all, it helps to educate the entire industry.

Here’s what that email looks like:

This is a great way for The Cloud Alchemist to get feedback, see what can be improved, improve customer satisfaction, and also gain exposure with public feedback that’s shared with the community.

Deliver a personal touch

With every order that goes out, The Cloud Alchemist team includes a handwritten thank you message on their packing slips.

Included alongside stickers, cards, and other branded items, they take this opportunity to thank the customer personally for this business. After all, every customer has a choice, and their choice impacts your bottom line. If they choose to do with you, especially in a crowded industry, take that extra step to thank them for their time and prove your dedication to them as a customer. It will often be returned.

Reward customers for their loyalty

The Cloud Alchemist uses S Loyalty for their customer loyalty program solution. Like their approach to personalized emails, for their loyalty program, The Cloud Alchemist has turned on storefront notifications to showcase relevant reminders to shoppers about the loyalty program as they visit their site.

Enabling notifications has helped them with more consistent loyalty program engagement and has increased engagement outside of the segment of users that already engaging with the program.

Here’s what Trevor had to say about it:

“There were a handful of customers that religiously used their points as they accrued them (mostly at the $10-20 reward mark), but this year we also turned on the email feature to remind customers that they had points to spend 14 days after earning enough to redeem.

It has been my personal impression that, since setting it up, we’ve had a marked uptick in returning customers using redeemed rewards and having those orders come through at a more regular and even pace (vs a tendency to have “hot” days where stacks of orders come in, generally on Fridays/paydays).”

Each of these customer loyalty strategies builds customer lifetime value for The Cloud Alchemist. This is especially important in a crowded industry, where customers have a plethora of choices when it comes to where to purchase.

Be sure to give your customers a feeling of personalization so that when they buy again, they buy from you.

2. How to Earn LTV Utilizing a Quality at Quantity Strategy

Super Hair Pieces is a direct-to-consumer hair piece store. Providing a wide assortment of styles, sizes, and colors, they have one of the largest inventories of hair pieces available online.

When I spoke with George Li about how they attracted a loyal following of repeat customers, it immediately became clear that their strategy is all about the product.

By delivering great hairpieces at the best possible prices, Super Hair Pieces has created a fighting force within the hair pieces industry.

The money they save with a lean strategy, they pass on to their customers. Here’s how it works.

Lower prices for increase loyalty

When a new potential customer comes to your site, it is better that they come at the recommendation of a friend rather than through an ad.

Why?

Because social proof is incredibly valuable, and people believe that brands they are recommended to are better than others –– often even if they aren’t.

Here are a couple stats for you to chew on:

• People are 4x more likely to buy something when recommended by a friend
• 67% of consumers modify the brands/companies they purchase from in order to maximize points.

Added both of those stats up –– and getting a loyalty program up and running for your business can mean serious $$$.

Super Hair Pieces implemented a loyalty program two year ago. The savings that George can offer through points and rewards encourages customer retention, as well as referrals, and allows the brand to focus on delivering what they do best (selling a great product as an affordable price).

Today, a healthy part of Super Hair Pieces’ customer base are loyal, repeat customers –– all without any major marketing campaigns.

3. How a Niche Brand Makes Gains on Industry-Wide LTV

Swiss Rasoi is an online specialty grocery store that sells Indian spices and ingredients. They’re based in Switzerland and serve the Swiss market with free delivery, and a vast selection of spices and staples needed for Indian cuisine.

They’ve created a colorful brand filled with quality images that reflect their product offerings –– i.e. Quality ingredients. This brand design is consistent across their online store, as well as, their social media channels, helping to reinforce a consistent, trustworthy message.

Here’s are a couple more stats for you:

• 83% of consumers say loyalty is driven primarily by trust
• 26% of consumers mention the terms “trust” and “consistency” as an important element of brand loyalty

Swiss Rasoi offers traditional products delivered right to your doorstep. With added conveniences like free delivery, unbeatable prices, and access to hard-to-find ingredients, they’ve created a brand where an increasing number of their customers come back to buy more.

Beautiful, resonating content for their community

The Swiss community for authentic Indian spices and ingredients might have started as a small niche, but Swiss Rasoi is creating brand recognition throughout the Swiss food industry. By delivering their color branded images which reflect their offerings, they create content that’s immediately recognizable with clear callouts.

In addition, every month, Swiss Rasoi hosts flash sales you can only find on their social media channels –– specifically Facebook.

By offering discounts on their already great prices, flash sales create an urgency for their customers to come back, make more purchases, and add to the brand’s overall LTV value.

How to Use Psychology to Drive Sales

More savings for loyal customers

In addition to offering their customers savings from offers and flash sales, Swiss Rasoi a loyalty program to give their best customers another avenue for saving on their quality ingredients.

When free shipping and low prices are standard, offering additional discounts through a loyalty program is something extra that Swiss Rasoi can give back to their loyal customers.

The more your purchase, the less you pay.

4. How to Play on the Power of Convenience for Increased LTV

Based in New Jersey, DBDPet became the largest dry goods vendor at reptile shows after just 6 years in business.

It’s a classic startup story: they started in a garage with one bearded dragon that laid eggs. Now they are expanding beyond a 5,000 sq ft warehouse by breeding exotic animals, and offering supplies for every kind of pet.

DBDPet realized, however, that it was difficult to explain where to buy supplies for the pets they sold. Today, they strive to be a one-stop shop for all reptile supplies while providing accurate and useful information about the nurturing and care for these pets.

For DBDPet, their path to customer loyalty was built from their expertise and the steady stream of advice and content they deliver to their community.

Offering expert advice through social media

Customers that shop at DBDPet come for the supplies, but stay for the advice and knowledge.

Social media became a way for Buddy and his team to spread their wisdom learned through years of experience in exotic pets.

They create a constant stream of content for Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which are essential for them to keep their current customers engaged while helping to reach new ones.

A loyalty program for a one-stop shop

As DBDPet became a one-stop shop for exotic pets, their knowledge and expertise became the foundation of their customer loyalty strategy.

By offering a broad range of products, they cater to every need of their customers. You can say they are the Amazon of exotic pet supplies –– and we all know how loyal Amazon shoppers are.

DBDPet uses a loyalty program to further encourage customers to who their one-stop shop for all exotic pet and pet supply needs.

5. Florida Colors Nursery

Florida Colors Nursery is a staple in the Plumeria community. Currently offering more than 1,200 varieties, many of which are their own, they also focus on providing extensive knowledge on growing, grafting, and cultivating Plumeria plants.

I briefly spoke with Tex Norwood, and it’s obvious that he and his team are fanatics about Plumeria flowers. Their customer loyalty comes from their thought leadership in the shared community around these flowers.

More than a thousand varieties shared on social media

Alongside multiple properties about Plumeria, Social Media has been a primary outlet for sharing the beautiful photos of these plants. With so many colors, combinations, shapes, and sizes, each one is best cared for a little differently than the next.

They’ve built a loyal following by sharing their latest cultivations, while providing best practices on how to care and keep them healthy. In total, they have thousands of followers within their community engaged with their Facebook page, community websites, and store.

It’s immediately obvious that Tex and his business partners are experts when it comes to Plumeria. Customers can find an endless bucket of wisdom and knowledge to best grow, graft, cultivate, and enjoy these flowers.

As for their loyalty program, customers are rewarded each time they buy, adding up to store credit and lower overall cost for the customer (plus great social referrals for the brand).

Final Word

These five stores each have a different approach to customer retention and customer loyalty –– ultimately leading to increased LTV –– which proves that there’s no one right way of keeping your customers engaged.

However, the one thing that all of these have in common is that they offer something that resonates well with their customers.

Whether that’s a wealth of expertise, affordable prices, or being passionate and personable; the lesson here is to treat your customers well, and they’ll return the favor.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

There is no denying that summer brings a different rhythm, energy and cadence to sales. Vacations, kids out of school, longer sunnier days are but a few contributing factors. Unfortunately, this just feeds in to tribal notions about selling the summer; no doubt helped by prospects and customers using “summer” to hold sellers at bay and fend off making decisions.

No, It Can’t Wait

While on the surface some of the reasoning presented by prospects (and often accepted at face value by some reps), may sound reasonable, they are not. When looked at in the cold light of time and quota, one can never take their eye off the prize, or assume that time somehow ticks away differently on the summer. A simple litmus test next time a prospect brings up summer, is to explore how tolerant their company is of seasonal short falls or slackness in effort.

Seasonal Adjustments

One benefit that the relaxed pace of summer brings, is people’s propensity to do mid-year reviews and status checks, and then adjust course accordingly. If you have dealt with a specific vertical, or set of buyers, you could be in a position to add to this process. Being that you have had greater exposure to best practices, you are in a position to offer value without talking product or sales. Having seen how different people and organisations approach similar opportunities, you should always be in a position to introduce new lines of thinking or tools that will help them complete their task, or enhance the effort. More on another way this can be handy in a minute.

Given that the cast of players in decisions is increasing, used to be 5.4, now it’s 6.7. Given that some of the players will be on vacation, others may be reluctant to make decisions. But that should not prevent you from going full speed into education and influence mode, using their relax stated to introduce elements into the discussion that will rekindle their enthusiasm, revive their energy to levels when they started their journey.

With the pressure gauge down, you will find it easier step back and refocus on things that precipitated the journey. We have had experiences, where mid-way through the year the focus and energy dips to where the project is abandoned, which explains the almost a third of deals that go to no decision. This is your opportunity to not worry about the ultimate decision, and have them emotionally recommit and reinvest in the project, which is an opportunity to review and learn what has changed, what would they do differently if they were to start over again, or at least based on their journey to date.

You must remember that some of these will in fact get back on track this year, others, while they may see merit again, will slip into next year, better than no sale at all.

Taking advantage of the mood of summer also allows you to explore the dynamics internally, and those that will have to be in place to ensure a decision coming out of Labour Day. How and who makes the decision, who can and has killed projects in the past, and other important facts that are much better exchanged in the Dog Days Of Summer.

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General Motors, once the world’s largest car maker, has decided to stop selling vehicles in India by the end of 2017, since it considers its India operation to be not profitable. The company re-entered a liberalizing India in 1994, after abandoning the country in 1954. Like its American compatriot Ford Motor Company, GM’s market share in India has always been in the single digits, but recently Ford has reported rising monthly sales of 36% in India.

A few years ago cosmetics company Mary Kay also exited India, blaming local issues for its problems. While India now claims to attract more foreign direct investment than China, American companies have not been as visible as European and East Asian players. Is there something wrong with the India opportunity, or are American companies being unnecessarily restrained about the world’s fastest-growing major economy? We think it is the latter, and that it is correctable with the right approach to India. After all, we have seen dozens of large American players become successful in modern India. Boeing, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Cummins, Dell, General Electric, Google, HP, McDonald’s, and PepsiCo are examples.

Based on our experience in India and with companies such as those named above, we think that GM’s sales failure in India holds five lessons for American CEOs across many sectors.

#1 — Consistent Leadership Over Time Matters in This Market

India is a complex country and has a unique mix of Asian and Western values. Understanding it takes time and focus. For a period of 14 years, General Electric had the same American expat running the India operation, Scott Bayman. But General Motors had nine different people lead its India business in 21 years. A motivated executive needs about three years to become fluent in India, yet GM’s average CEO only lasted a little over two years. It does not matter whether the leader is a local Indian or an expat, in our experience, but consistency in India requires a steady hand at the top.

#2 — Local Leaders Need as Much Autonomy as Possible

Having local autonomy is key to succeeding in India, since its market structure is fundamentally different from the West’s and therefore demands extreme customization. Large American companies have complicated structures that often require international leaders to have regular face-to-face interaction at headquarters; this can take away from being in close touch with the Indian market. To succeed in India, an American company either needs to have robust electronic communication processes at the top management level or must be willing to set its leaders in India free of the bureaucracy at corporate headquarters, so that they can address local issues and opportunities.

Local autonomy makes important decisions possible. PepsiCo developed an entire line of snack foods, Kurkure, just for India, while Whirlpool designed its washing machines to attract Indian buyers who preferred hand washing. Western Union partnered with India’s postal service to deliver payments across the country. One of us (Gunjan) counseled a top video game company to develop collaboration processes so that engineers in Bangalore and California could work on one integrated team over a 12.5-hour time zone difference; improvements were suggested equally by team members in both countries.

#3 — Competition Is India-Specific, and Your Strategy Needs to Be, Too

In many sectors, American entrants to India encounter new competitors, which might be local or foreign players. For example, Suzuki, known in America for its motorcycles, holds 47% market share in India’s car market. Homegrown automotive companies such as Tata Motors can be formidable partners or competitors. In this mix, an American company must develop a unique, India-specific strategy and product road map. Dropping products designed for other markets into India does not work beyond the short term.

Even more important, local firms can become global competitors. Mahindra & Mahindra, a local Indian firm, has risen to challenge John Deere in the worldwide agricultural tractor business. Hyundai has succeeded in India precisely because it developed lower-priced subcompact cars tailored to the needs of the Indian middle class.

#4 — Strategy Also Needs to Be Based on Volume and Scale

Success in India requires a commitment to volume and scale. Unlike Bentley or Rolls-Royce, GM is a mass-market car company in the U.S. To be successful in India, GM must participate not just in the top of the economic pyramid but also in the middle. That is how you build scale and volume that allows the company to leverage assets like dealerships.

As recently as 2015, when Mary Barra, CEO of GM, committed to investing another $1 billion in expanding Indian operations, the company seemed to understand the impact of scale. However, it has now decided to pull back its investment and run its Talegaon factory in western India, to make cars primarily for the Latin America market. GM will keep its technology center in Bangalore. But we won’t be surprised if good managers at both of these locations soon find more-promising opportunities at employers that are more committed to the Indian market.

#5 — It’s a Long Game

Companies such as PepsiCo and Boeing took the long view of India, and have reaped profits due to persistence as much as vision. Over time, India’s car market will be among the top three, after China and the United States. Even more crucial, the future of mobility will be shaped by three disruptive forces: electrification, shared ownership, and driverless technology. India has the promise to be a low-cost laboratory in which to experiment with new business models. A future GM CEO will have to re-enter India both to leverage its huge consumption market and to tap into the country as a source for global innovation. But Indians have long memories, and GM’s last two forays into the country will not be forgotten. The cost of re-entry will be much, much higher in the future. Success in India is a marathon, and while giving up in the middle may seem like a good short-term tactic, it is not a good long-term strategy.

A business-friendly government, simplified indirect taxation (in the form of a national good and services tax), and soon-to-be-ubiquitous smartphones are forces that will transform and grow the Indian economy dramatically over the next decade. American CEOs need to take heed of these five lessons and embrace engagement with India. Ceding what will soon be the most populous country on the planet to Asian and European competitors could have disastrous long-term consequences.

Once upon a time, two teenagers fell in love. However, their respective families were enemies and forbade the two from seeing one another. As teenagers are wont to do, they disobeyed this order and then explained why it held no water in the first place. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” Juliet says of Romeo, teaching generations of readers to come that it’s not the name that matters but what’s on the inside.

Did Shakespeare ever think his work would be used to talk about B2B selling techniques? Probably not. But his words reveal universal truths that can be applied across centuries and disciplines. This quote, in particular, resonates with the rapidly growing field of account-based marketing. As with any new and emerging strategy, the particulars are still being defined and naming conventions are still up in the air.

Account based marketing. Account based selling. Account based selling development. All of these terms are used nearly interchangeably. They all attempt to put a name on something that Marketo defines as “a strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts and employs personalized campaigns.” And the expected results are all the same: improve sales and marketing alignment, better engagement with marketing and sales efforts, more closed deals, and bigger deal size.

SalesforLife and Engagio recently partnered to release the State of Account-Based Sales Development Report. The data within sheds light on how this tactic is currently being used and the success people are seeing. The report provides an important and detailed look at real world usage of ABM. To describe their choice of using the term account based sales development the authors say “we think Account Based Marketing is too limited a name, instead we use the term Account Based Sales Development.”

Their reasoning is fair and in the end what term you use comes down to personal preference. This report feels that account based sales development better represents the idea that every department within an organization is responsible and accountable for success. However, no matter what term you choose to use, always keep in mind that account based marketing is a holistic approach that incorporates many different tactics and strategies.

With that all in mind, let’s take a look at the biggest takeaways from the Saleslife and Engagio report.

The Top Three Outcomes of Account Based Marketing

Respondents to the survey were asked to rank the top three outcomes they have seen from implementing their ABM program. Three answers tied for the top choice:

• Increased revenue
• Increased pipeline
• Higher quality leads

These outcomes are exactly what account based marketing is designed to provide. In fact, those surveyed were also asked their top three reasons for using ABM. Those same three choices were once again the top answers. Organizations are implementing an account based marketing framework with lofty goals in mind. And the results they are seeing are perfectly aligned with their expectations. This particular point is a heartening one for believers in ABM; the theories and strategies are bearing fruit.

Don’t Test the Waters, Take the Full Plunge

Account-based marketing is not something to be taken lightly. It’s not something that can be done with a half-hearted effort and be expected to produce results. ABM requires diligent planning, strategizing, shifting of resources, commitment, and high-level execution.

The State of Account-Based Sales Development found that those who fully participate in an account based marketing strategy are much more likely to have success than those that merely test a program. “The majority of companies with full ABSD program in place rated their satisfaction ‘extremely’ or ‘fairly’ higher by 54% than those who didn’t have formal ABSD programs in place,” the report says.

These results prove that account based marketing produces the best results with proper planning and resource allotment. It will take time to see the efforts pay off, but in the long run the due diligence performed upon initial implementation will pay for itself many times over. “Individuals who had their program in place for more than a year were significantly more satisfied,” the authors write.

This report is yet another piece of evidence that proves account based marketing works, and that it’s here to stay. No matter what term you choose to use when implementing your strategy, ensure that you give it the proper time and care that it deserves and you will be rewarded for your efforts.

TL;DR Making a list of your personal values (aka core values) takes 15 minutes and will help you make better decisions.

Have you ever been faced with a difficult decision and not known which direction to take?

Have you ever spent days or weeks or months going back and forth on a decision? You start with “Yes I will do it,” then “no I won’t,” then back to “yes I will.”

Assuming you’re human, the answer to either of those questions is “yes.”

So how do you decide what to say yes to? And what to say no to?

You need to have a list of personal values to refer to.

A Personal Values Definition

What are personal values? Personal values (sometimes called core values) are broad concepts that can be applied over and over again across a range of circumstances, as opposed to narrow answers to specific questions.

Your core values are what you consider most important in your life, literally what you “value.”

Whether you are conscious of them or not, you have values for every part of your life — parenting values, investing values, work values, and health values. There are also more overarching life values.

An example of a value would be:

Self-development: to keep growing, advancing, or improving in knowledge, skills, character, or life experience

This value could help you answer questions like “Should I take a slightly higher paying job where I won’t learn as much, or a lower paying one where I will develop my skills a lot faster?”

All successful people have values that allow them to achieve their goals. If you don’t have values, you are just reacting to events that happen in your life without thinking about how to best react to them in a way that lines up with what’s important to you.

Having a List of Core Values Helps You Make Better Decisions

Most people have a bad taste in their mouth about core values because we typically hear about them in the context of companies that often blatantly disregard them.

Enron had a list of four core values including “integrity” and “communication,” which they talked about publicly, while behind the scenes they were actually lying and hiding information from their own employees and shareholders.

You’ve probably worked for a company that had a list of core values posted somewhere, but they didn’t seem to make any impact on the way the company was actually run.

But the truth is that creating a list of personal values is both useful and practical, because you can apply them directly to your own life. I make decisions based on my list every single week.

One of my core values is courage.

I discovered this was a core value for me, because I noticed a tendency in myself to pick projects that were not risky enough and have them fail as a result.

I would have the choice between two opportunities, and I would say “this one will almost certainly work, while the other one is a bit riskier, so I’ll do the easy one.”

Then I would start working on the project, and because it didn’t really stretch me, I would get bored or feel like I wasn’t reaching for what I was capable of. That would end with me quitting or doing subpar work.

In cases where I picked the seemingly riskier choice, I became very engaged in the project and while I was working on it, my capabilities grew to be able to actually do it well.

Picking the more courageous choice meant I was more likely to succeed and enjoy the process more.

By adopting courage as a core principle, I was able to identify that repeated failure pattern in myself and fix it. Given the choice between two opportunities, I now pick the one that is more courageous. I also make these decisions more quickly and efficiently than I did before.

If you aren’t conscious of this, you are likely to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Example: My Personal Values

So how do you put together a list of personal values? I’ll give some examples of personal values from my own life to help you get started in figuring out your own.

Some of them may be helpful to you, but others certainly won’t. I think the core values that are most valuable to each of us come from our own personal experience, not from being taught and accepting someone else’s.

My hope is that by reading through my list, you will get a sense for how a list of core values could be helpful in making better decisions.

1. Agency: to choose how I live and behave and help others do likewise; to be self-supportive and choose my own way of doing things.
2. Self-Development: to keep growing, advancing, or improving in knowledge, skills, character, or life experience.
3. Courage: to be courageous or brave; to persist in the face of fear, threat, or difficulty; to take risks for others.
4. Impact: to exert myself into the universe in a way I believe is important. I work for what I want, not what others want from me.
5. Soul in the Game: I believe it is an ethical concern that I put my money and time where my mouth is, that I have no divorce between what I preach and my lifestyle. I believe the highest form of ethics is to take on risk for others.
6. Reciprocity: to create more value than I capture.

How I Use My Personal Values

My personal values are very practical for me and I use them in two main ways.

First, I read over them every week as part of my weekly review. During my review, I reflect on the past week and make plans for the next week. In between reflecting and planning, I read through my core values document.

Second, I read them whenever I am struggling to make a big decision like moving cities or changing careers. Typically, reading through my core values list makes it obvious to me what the right answer is.

Over time, I find that I am getting better at internalizing the values and they express themselves subconsciously with smaller decisions, as well.

What if more than one choice lines up with your core values?

Sometimes a decision can go either way and both still match up with your core values. I was deciding between two books I wanted to write, and the truth is that both of them matched up with my core values.

In that sense, the decision didn’t matter. I could choose to write either book and I would still be in alignment with what matters most to me.

The decision then became more of a strategic question: Which of these books will sell more copies? Which will be most beneficial to my career? Which will I most enjoy writing?

However, the strategy question only comes after the values one.

Two Ways to Discover Your Personal Values

Most of us have values that we have adopted from other pre-packaged sources, like a religion, culture, or legal system. There’s nothing wrong with adopting values from somewhere else and often the values from these sources have incorporated a huge amount of wisdom.

However, by adopting a value system without much thought, it’s easy to hold personal values that lead to a conflict between what you say you believe and the actions you take. I’m sure you’ve met someone who says they believe in the tenets of a particular religious or spiritual tradition, but then they behave counter to its teachings.

So how do you discover your own core values?

1. Having and reflecting on life experiences

The best way to find your values is often through making mistakes and violating them. Good judgment comes from experience and you usually get that experience by making bad judgments.

One of the values I recently added to my list was:

Impact: to exert myself into the universe in a way that I believe is important. I work for what I want, not what others want from me.

This may sound egotistical and you may disagree with it. That’s totally fine.

Over a period of two years, I noticed that when I worked on projects that other people told me I should work on, I wasn’t really excited to be working on them. This meant I did poor quality work, and the project ended up not being very good for my own career or for my customers.

However, when I worked on projects that I believed were really important, even when other people thought they weren’t the best idea, I worked incredibly hard and talked about them passionately, which inspired others to help me. These projects ended up being more successful and helping more people.

So for me, the counterintuitive truth was that by working for what I want and not for what others want, I did more to help other people, which is also one of my values.

2. Hearing someone else clearly express a deeply held belief of mine

The other way I discover my personal values is by hearing someone express a deeply held belief of mine that I did not have the words to articulate.

One of my values is that “I have soul in the game.”

This is a term inspired by a phrase used in The Black Swan that immediately resonated with me. The book explains that having “skin in the game” means you are responsible for the consequences of your actions. Entrepreneurs have skin in the game because if they make a decision and the company tanks, they bear the weight of those consequences.

Having soul in the game is going a step further: taking on risk for others. Think of a whistleblower who speaks out at the risk of destroying their own career.

I’d never had a clear way to put it into words until I read the book, but this resonated with me so much that I added it to my list of

personal values.

How to Make Your First List of Personal Values in Less Than 15 Minutes

1. Look through this list of examples of personal values and pick five that resonate with you.

The first time you put together a list of core values, it’s easiest to start from an existing list.

Over time, you can reflect and add or modify these based on your personal experiences, or if you read or hear something that you find resonates with you. Remember that there are no objectively “right” or “wrong” answers.

Look through this list of personal values and make a note of each one that resonates with you by writing it down. Write down at least 10.

If you’d like to download this list to print off or save, you can click here.

1. Acceptance: to be open to and accepting of myself, others, life, etc.
2. Adventure: to be adventurous; to actively seek, create, or explore novel or stimulating experiences
3. Assertiveness: to respectfully stand up for my rights and request what I want
4. Authenticity: to be authentic, genuine, and real; to be true to myself
5. Beauty: to appreciate, create, nurture, or cultivate beauty in myself, others, the environment, etc.
6. Caring: to be caring toward myself, others, the environment, etc.
7. Challenge: to keep challenging myself to grow, learn, and improve
8. Compassion: to act with kindness toward those who are suffering
9. Conformity: to be respectful and obedient of rules and obligations
10. Connection: to engage fully in whatever I am doing, and be fully present with others
11. Contribution: to contribute, help, assist, or make a positive difference to myself or others
12. Cooperation: to be cooperative and collaborative with others
13. Courage: to be courageous or brave; to persist in the face of fear, threat, or difficulty
14. Creativity: to be creative or innovative
15. Curiosity: to be curious, open-minded, and interested; to explore and discover
16. Encouragement: to encourage and reward behavior that I value in myself or others
17. Equality: to treat others as equal to myself, and vice versa
18. Excitement: to seek, create, and engage in activities that are exciting, stimulating, or thrilling
19. Fairness: to be fair to myself or others
20. Fitness: to maintain or improve my fitness; to look after my physical and mental health and well-being
21. Flexibility: to adjust and adapt readily to changing circumstances
22. Forgiveness: to be forgiving toward myself or others
23. Freedom: to live freely; to choose how I live and behave, or help others do likewise
24. Friendliness: to be friendly, companionable, or agreeable toward others
25. Fun: to be fun-loving; to seek, create, and engage in fun-filled activities
26. Generosity: to be generous, sharing, and giving, to myself or others
27. Gratitude: to be grateful for and appreciative of the positive aspects of myself, others, and life
28. Honesty: to be honest, truthful, and sincere with myself and others
29. Humility: to be humble or modest; to let my achievements speak for themselves
30. Humor: to see and appreciate the humorous side of life
31. Independence: to be self-supportive, and choose my own way of doing things
32. Industry: to be industrious, hard-working, and dedicated
33. Intimacy: to open up, reveal, and share myself — emotionally or physically — in my close personal relationships
34. Justice: to uphold justice and fairness
35. Kindness: to be kind, compassionate, considerate, nurturing, or caring toward myself or others
36. Love: to act lovingly or affectionately toward myself or others
37. Mindfulness: to be conscious of, open to, and curious about my here-and-now experience
38. Open-mindedness: to think things through, see things from others’ points of view, and weigh evidence fairly
39. Order: to be orderly and organized
40. Patience: to wait calmly for what I want
41. Persistence: to continue resolutely, despite problems or difficulties
42. Pleasure: to create and give pleasure to myself or others
43. Power: to strongly influence or wield authority over others, e.g., taking charge, leading, organizing
44. Reciprocity: to build relationships in which there is a fair balance of giving and taking
45. Respect: to be respectful toward myself or others; to be polite, be considerate, and show positive regard
46. Responsibility: to be responsible and accountable for my actions
47. Romance: to be romantic; to display and express love or strong affection
48. Safety: to secure, protect, or ensure safety of myself or others
49. Self-awareness: to be aware of my own thoughts, feelings, and actions
50. Self-care: to look after my health and well-being, and get my needs met
51. Self-control: to act in accordance with my own ideals
52. Self-development: to keep growing, advancing, or improving in knowledge, skills, character, or life experience.
53. Sensuality: to create, explore, and enjoy experiences that stimulate the five senses
54. Sexuality: to explore or express my sexuality
55. Skillfulness: to continually practice and improve my skills, and apply myself fully when using them
56. Spirituality: to connect with things bigger than myself
57. Supportiveness: to be supportive, helpful, encouraging, and available to myself or others
58. Trust: to be trustworthy; to be loyal, faithful, sincere, and reliable
59. Insert your own value here.¹

Next, go through the ones you wrote down and list them from most important to least important.

Got it?

2. Save the Top 5 values on your list someplace where you can look at them and update them.

I keep my values in an Evernote note where I can easily look at them and modify them.

Your values are always changing and you’re also getting a better idea of what you value. I used to value novelty a lot — new experiences and new people. For a period of my life, that really was a core value and I prioritized my life around it. In the last few years, though, I’ve come to value spending time getting to know the people already in my life more than meeting new people and seeing new places, so I took it off my list.

The terms on the list above are just a starting point and not an exhaustive list. You also want to try and pick terms that emotionally resonate with you. The phrase “soul in the game” probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means a lot to me. Whenever I hear something that really resonates with me, I will add it to my list.

3. Look at them regularly.

Now that you have a list of values, you want to put it to work. Pick a time when you can regularly review them. If you have a time in your week, month, or year where you regularly do any sort of planning, reviewing your core values is a good activity to tack on. Regularly looking over them keeps them fresh in your mind and lets you make decisions that align with your values.

I look at mine every Saturday morning, which is when I do my weekly review and planning.

Takeaways

There was a study done in the 1990s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of “Flow,” where different professionals were studied to see which ones were happy and productive and which were unhappy and unproductive. The most important factor was alignment with personal values.

The happiest, most productive profession was geneticists because all parties involved respected the best science. Even though pharmaceutical companies were injecting a lot of money into the field, geneticists believed doing the very best science on a day-to-day basis led to more benefits for the general public, the pharmaceutical companies, their universities, and themselves — the work they were doing was in alignment with their core values.

The least happy, and least productive profession was journalism. Most journalists had entered the field with high ideals about truth, making a difference, and the free press. But the decline of the family-run newspaper and rise of corporate media empires made journalism a profit center where all that mattered was sales, which meant good journalism was bad for business and was replaced by scare stories, exaggeration, and scandal. Their values did not align with their day-to-day work.

A follow-up study done by McGregor and Little in 1998² found that meaningfulness of individuals’ personal projects depended on how consistent they were with core aspects of self and identity — in other words, their core values.

The happiest and most productive people were taking daily actions in line with their core values.

This gives them a constant sense of motivation, because they see how the work they are doing today leads to a long-term vision that they find meaningful.

Your personal values are specific to you and a result of your own life experiences. You can discover and refine your values through life experience or encountering ideas that resonate with you.

Having a written list of your personal values will help you make better decisions.

Want a step-by-step guide to finding your personal values for the first time?

Click below to download a free worksheet for finding your personal values.

Acknowledgment: Ray Dalio.

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Want to become a prospecting superstar? LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a fantastic resource. It simplifies the process of finding, contacting, and staying up-to-date with prospects, referrals, and customers.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has three tiers, each with different features and costs: Professional, Team, and Enterprise. We’ve broken down the need-to-know info about each tier so you can decide which works best for you and your team.

Let’s go.

Why Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid subscription service designed to streamline the process of finding new leads, making connections, and driving conversions. It is available for both individuals and teams and, according to the official Navigator page, “the best version of LinkedIn for sales professionals.”

But what does it really bring to the table?

In practice, LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers improved search capabilities, increased visibility into extended contact networks, and personalized algorithms that make it possible for sales and marketing teams to reach the right decision-maker at target companies.

While the tool shares some features with Premium Business, Sales Navigator is purpose-built to help teams make the most of LinkedIn connections, find new contacts, and increase overall sales.

Specific benefits of Sales Navigator include:

• Searches for your target audience using advanced filters
• Recommended sales leads and update tracking
• Advanced filtering not available in any other LinkedIn version
• Job change alerts
• Specific keyword mentions
• Unlimited profile searches

Consider this last benefit — unlimited searches. While LinkedIn is a free social platform, the company does cap the number of profile searches you can do each month. Reach that limit and you’ll have to wait until searches roll over the next month. Sales Navigator removes this limitation and allows you to search as many profiles as necessary to achieve your sales goals.

Tier Overview: What You Get With Each

As noted above, Sales Navigator has three tiers: Professional, Team, and Enterprise.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator cost increases by tier — Professional is $79.99 per month with an annual subscription, and Team is $108.33 per month. For Enterprise pricing, you’ll need to contact LinkedIn directly.

Here’s a quick look at what you get with each tier.

Professional

Professional is the lowest-cost Sales Navigator option. It includes features such as advanced lead and company search, alerts on your sales leads and accounts, and the ability to create custom lists. Professional also integrates with popular sales tools such as SNAP, Outlook, and the Sales Navigator mobile app.

Team

Sales Navigator Team comes with all the features of Professional, along with the ability to share content and track engagement. You also get robust administrative tools and CRM platform syncing.

Enterprise

Enterprise takes your sales a step further with advanced CRM integrations. You get access to data validation and content creation tools, along with enterprise-level features such as single sign-on (SSO) for security and employee data integration for maximum sales impact.

Not sure if LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the right fit for your business? LinkedIn offers a 1-month free trial for members that aren’t on paid subscription plans and haven’t used any free trials in the last 365 days.

Thinking about making the switch but not sure how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Read on for version-specific tips to help you make the most of this powerful sales framework.

Tips for Sales Navigator Professional

1. Message prospects without using your InMail quota.

Professional, Team, and Enterprise Sales Navigator users can send up to 20, 30, and 50 InMail messages per month, respectively. If you want to send more than that, target users with “Open Profiles,” who won’t count toward your InMail quota.

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As a bonus, “Open Profile” users are generally pretty receptive to being contacted.

2. Download the mobile app.

Salespeople who spend lots of time away from their desk will appreciate the Sales Navigator app (available for iOS and Android.)

The app delivers real-time updates about saved accounts and leads, so reps can quickly reach out after a prospect has written a new post, showed up in the press, or shared company news. Users can also see their daily account and lead recommendations and browse buyer profiles.

The ability to save leads and accounts is also handy. With this feature, field sales reps can instantly save the connections they’ve made after a meeting or call rather than waiting till they’re in front of a computer.

Lastly, the Sales Navigator app lets reps send InMail and messages on the go. Contacting a prospect quickly after a compelling event can mean the difference between winning and losing a deal, so this is a powerful feature.

3. Upgrade your profile.

It’s easier to stand out with a Sales Navigator Team or Enterprise account, since these come with a larger profile picture and background photo.

In addition, these users are displayed more prominently in search results. If a prospect searches for someone matching a rep’s description, that rep has a greater chance of catching her eye.

4. View similar prospects.

Sales Navigator search functions include the ability to suggest similar leads to ones you’re currently pursuing. Simply click the drop-down button on a lead you’re looking at and then click “View similar” — this will bring up a list of leads with similar job titles or roles. This is a great way to focus your sales efforts on decision-makers and reduce the amount of time spent trying to find the right person in a company.

5. Expand your search impact.

The more focused your search, the better your results. LinkedIn Sales Navigator includes several features to make searches more specific, including:

• Displaying potential leads that already follow your company
• Discovering which leads have posted on LinkedIn in the past month
• Seeing which leads were mentioned in the news
• Finding prospects that have recently changed jobs
• Identifying contacts with shared connections

Tips for Sales Navigator Team

1. Integrate sales navigator with your HubSpot CRM.

LinkedIn has partnered with several CRM providers — HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho, and Infor — to bring profile details and shared connections from Sales Navigator experience into your CRM.

That means as you’re doing your day-to-day in the CRM, you won't have to open a new tab (or three) to track down the lead or account in Sales Navigator. With a team account you can:

• Send InMail directly from a contact record
• View shared connections
• Ask mutual connections for introductions
• Add leads at the same company and add them to your Sales Navigator leads list
• Connect with people at an organization who have shared connections or interests
• Find out who you're already connected to in the organization

Here’s a sample of what that integration might look like, in the context of HubSpot CRM:

Already using one of the CRMs that integrates with Sales Navigator? Set up the sync now. Using another CRM, or not using one at all? Fear not: LinkedIn will be expanding the universe of CRM integrations so stay tuned.

Note: To use HubSpot's integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you must have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team or Enterprise account.

2. Apply the TeamLink filter.

According to LinkedIn, you’re more likely to leave a favorable impression with buyers if you were introduced to them by a mutual connection. With the TeamLink Connections filter, you can easily find the prospects who meet your search criteria and share an acquaintance with you, whether it’s a first or second-degree connection.

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This filter taps the networks of the other members of your sales team and your first-degree connections.

Note: You must have a Team or Enterprise accounts to use TeamLink.

3. Save a TeamLink search.

Just because you don’t have a mutual connection with a prospect now doesn’t mean you never will. Your contacts form new connections every week. But it’s inefficient to manually run the same searches again and again in the hopes something has changed.

Fortunately, the “save search” feature lets you automate this step. Once you’ve defined your search parameters and applied the TeamLink filter, check the “Save Search” box.

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Now, if one of your coworkers connects with one of your leads, you’ll be instantly notified.

Note: You must have a Team or Enterprise account to use TeamLink.

4. Check out the TeamLink section.

You can also check out the TeamLink section of an accounts page, which helps you build strategic relationships at an organization you’re targeting.

Let’s say you want to work with Blue Leaf. When you check out the TeamLink section of the Blue Leaf account page, TeamLink will display the current employees who are connected to members of your network. You can now ask those mutual connections for introductions.

Note: You must have a Team or Enterprise accounts to use TeamLink.

5. Access the network of every person at your company.

TeamLink lets you tap into the connections of every Sales Navigator seatholder at your company. But that mostly limits you to salespeople, recruiters, and maybe your executives — after all, the average marketer, customer support rep, or finance associate isn't going to need an account.

With TeamLink Extend, these people can now opt-in to the Sales Navigator network. That means your pool of available contacts becomes much bigger.

The first 1,000 seats of TeamLink Extend come bundled free with every Enterprise Edition contract.

6. Create custom lists of your prospects to keep track of their status.

According to new research from Weidert Group, up to six different people are now involved in every B2B purchasing decision.

To effectively work an account, you need to keep track of who’s involved in the buying process, form connections with them, and identify their unique objectives and priorities. It’s no small feat.

Sales Navigator helps streamline this information by allowing you to create lists and filter leads based on the criteria you set. Once you’ve identified a relevant contact, you use keywords to show you only contacts who fit those criteria.

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7. Use the “Interested In” filter to find ways of providing value.

Finding ways to add value to your prospects’ lives isn’t always easy. Thanks to the “Interested In” filter, you can instantly figure out which buyers need your help — which will give you a major advantage when reaching out.

For example, you can run a search for “mid-level marketing managers” and further narrow down the pool with the “Interested In: Industry experts” filter. Every prospect the search returns has self-indicated they’d like to meet industry experts. You can volunteer your own expertise, offer to connect them with a specialist inside your company, or introduce them to an external contact.

8. Use advanced filters to identify your ideal customers.

Thanks to Sales Navigator’s advanced filters, salespeople can hone in on specific prospect types. These include:

• Exclude saved, viewed, or contacted leads
• Company type: Public, private, or nonprofit (Also available in LinkedIn Premium)
• Groups (Also available in LinkedIn Premium)
• Years in current position
• Years at current company
• Years of experience (Also available in LinkedIn Premium)
• Member since (Also available in LinkedIn Premium)
• Headquarter
• Seniority level (Also available in LinkedIn Premium)
• Posted content keywords

If you’re not quite sold on this feature yet, LinkedIn provides a full list of the advanced search filters.

9. Target high-value accounts.

Sales and Marketing, good news: Working together on LinkedIn campaigns is easier than ever before, thanks to an integration between Sales Navigator and Campaign Manager.

Like before, marketers are responsible for ad creative, budget, and timeline. Yet now, they can target the leads and accounts their sales reps are pursuing — meaning your messaging and value prop will be top-of-mind when you're engaging with potential customers.

Marketing can even take advantage of lookalike modeling, so they can find and market to users similar to existing prospects and customers.

Salespeople can see exactly how their prospects are engaging with marketing content and will even get alerts when a saved account has read, liked, or shared their company's sponsored content.

10. Leverage shared interests.

One of the best ways to encourage more sales? Finding something in common to start the conversation. LinkedIn Sales Navigator streamlines this process with the “Share experiences with you” filter that shows you leads that have shared interests listed on their profile. These shared interests provide a great jumping-off point for conversations that go beyond basic cold calls and emails, in turn making it easier to jumpstart the sales process.

Tips for Sales Navigator Enterprise

1. Build rapport With “Shared Experiences and Commonalities”.

Sales Navigator already allows users to save leads, but the “Share experiences with you” filter makes it easier to surface opportunities within that database. The filter gives you a strong foundation for building rapport by pulling together all the prospects who have at least one thing in common with you: Maybe you both lived in Manhattan at one point, worked for the same company, volunteered with the same nonprofit, or have another point of commonality.

Mentioning this point of similarity when you reach out (either in your email subject line, the message body, or in your voicemail) will boost your chances of getting a response.

2. Unlock out-of-network user profiles.

The unlock feature, which is available with Sales Navigator Team, lets reps view the full profile of a user outside of their network. Once they’ve unlocked a profile, everyone on their Sales Navigator team can see it.

Every team member can unlock up to 25 profiles per month. To do so, click the blue “Unlock member profile” button in the top section of a member’s profile.

3. Refine your lead and account recommendations.

Sales Navigator can help reps keep their pipeline full with automatic lead and account recommendations. To make sure their recommendations align as closely as possible with their buyer personas, salespeople should take advantage of the tool’s Sales Preferences. These criteria include region, industry, function, and seniority level.

To add or modify these settings, click your profile picture in the top right corner and choose “Settings.”

Then scroll down to the Sales Preferences section, type your choices, and click “Done.”

Sales Preferences only apply to lead and account recommendations, meaning regular searches include results that fall outside of a user’s saved choices. For instance, a rep might ask for recommendations for executive assistants in California, but simply searching “executive assistant” could generate prospects that live elsewhere.

4. Validate your CRM data.

"Clean data" might not be the most glamorous two-word string in the English language, but it's critical to a high-functioning sales org. Without up-to-date, accurate information on leads, prospects, and customers, it's much harder for a rep to build rapport, earn credibility, add value, and eventually win the business.

That's why LinkedIn's Data Validation feature is so great. It automatically updates contact data in your CRM in real time. Maybe you're in the early stages of your sales process when your main contact leaves the company. Because he updates his title, the record in your CRM changes too.

5. Upload your book of business to Sales Navigator.

If you’re just starting out with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you may already have a list of contacts that you’re working with. Now, LinkedIn lets you upload that CSV list into Sales Navigator so you can seamlessly connect with your leads all in one place.

If you’ve had trouble closing a deal or if there are more stakeholders in the approval process, you can uncover insights that will help you prioritize those contacts and plan your next steps to engage with them. You’ll also get alerts regarding updates at the company so you never miss a beat.

6. Generate interest with InMail.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you access to InMail – LinkedIn’s version of email or direct messages. InMail is only available to Sales Navigator subscribers, meaning your prospects likely see far fewer InMails than typical emails.

The result? If you can stand out from the crowd by finding a shared interest or offering a unique viewpoint, InMail makes it possible to boost your connective impact.

7. Create a custom outreach message.

Speaking of impact, one great way to do this in LinkedIn Sales Navigator is by creating a custom outreach message. First, run an advanced LinkedIn search to get details about your sales target’s industry, location, and market niche.

Then, send something like this connection request template:

 

“Hi, {first_name}, I’m reaching out to grow our network of {your_industry} leaders.

Here in {your_city}, we’re exploring some great opportunities in {your_industry_niche}, and it would be great to connect with you and share what we’ve learned.”

Adjust the details to match your needs, but make best use of the {} filters available in LinkedIn to create quick and easy templates you can quickly send to multiple leads. Worth noting? Connection — not conversion — is the goal of these initial InMails, so you’re best served by aiming for a natural, conversational tone over something more sales-focused.

Prospect Better With LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is a B2B sales and marketing powerhouse, and Sales Navigator gives your team critical insights to make the most of it. Whether you’re a team of one or part of an established enterprise, this tool has features to help you close deals with a human-centered perspective. There’s no more guessing or sending cold emails to the wrong decision-maker. LinkedIn Sales navigator unlocks the secrets to closing deals that the best prospectors and sales professionals swear by.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

3 Steps To Finding Sales Leads on LinkedIn

If you follow the simple steps I’ve outlined below, you’ll walk away with a fast, easy and efficient way to generate more sales leads than you know what to do with on the world’s largest platform for professionals.

As someone who has spent the past five years showing others how to generate new business with LinkedIn, I still meet people each day who had no idea what’s possible on the platform.

If you’re in that camp, prepare to have your eyes opened – wide!

Step 1 – Do an Advance Search on LinkedIn

Step 2- Create Customized Connections

Step 3 – Reach Out and Scale Up.

The Keys to the Kingdom