Creating a seamless referral experience for mobile users is essential to a successful referral program, however it’s not always so easy. Sometimes you need a little inspiration. To help you get started with creating a great mobile referral program, we have collected 34 great examples in all main categories of apps.

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Mobile has become an essential piece of the referral puzzle. There’s no way to have a meaningful referral program that doesn’t include a clear vision for sending invitations and claiming referrals on mobile.

However, creating a seamless referral experience for mobile users is not always so easy. Sometimes you need a little inspiration. To help you get started with creating a great mobile referral program, we describe 34 examples here. And of course, you should check out our blog post which looks more deeply at the mobile experience of several referral programs.

Table of Contents:

• Retail & fashion
• Food & groceries
• Travel & hospitality
• Services
• Finance & personal savings
• Productivity
• Other

Retail & Fashion

1. Amazon

The fact that even retail giant Amazon doesn’t shy away from offering a referral program for recruiting new users is a testament to how useful these programs can be.

Amazon’s referral program is buried deep in the app interface and it offers a double-sided $5 bonus like most similar programs. And students go crazy making money from referrals.

2. Gilt

Gilt is an online shopping and lifestyle business focusing on making flash sales for luxury fashion items that usually last 36-48 hours. Gilt offers a referral program that rewards both sides with the same $25 bonus after the recipient makes their first purchase.This is a great example of a referral program because it allows customers to use all major channels to share Gilt with their friends.

3. Wish

Wish is an ecommerce marketplace, which customers can use to purchase fashion items, electronics, and other goods. The platform centers on providing low prices by connecting its users directly with Chinese manufacturers. The network is reported to be generating over $2 billion in general merchandise sales.

Wish lowers the barrier to conversion with its referral program by not requiring a minimum order amount in order to claim a reward. Customers of Wish are further incentivized to make larger purchases with a percent discount, rather than a flat amount.

4. Poshmark

Poshmark is a platform allowing users to buy and sell clothing and footwear. Acquiring new users is essential to the company because it relies on them both as sellers and buyers. The more buyers there are, the more sellers would be interested in joining and vice versa.

As part of their effort to get more people to sign up, Poshmark offers a referral program, which awards both sides in a referral with $5.

5. Slang

Slang is a platform that connects buyers and sellers of authentic sneakers and streetwear. Just as with other ecommerce apps, Slang offers $10 to both the customer making the invitation, as well as their friends who accept it.

On top of offering the standard ways to share the offer—through Twitter, Facebook, and their contact list—one of the provided offered by the app includes Instagram. Instagram is a place where many of Slang’s current and potential customers are likely to hang out, which is also well-suited to the products sold on the platform.

6. OfferUp

OfferUp is a marketplace where people can buy and sell used and new furniture, home electronics, cars, and more locally.

Unlike most similar platforms, that push to acquire new users aggressively, by offering generous rewards, OfferUp features a simple “Invite a Friend” functionality.

7. letgo

Letgo is another network that allows people to buy and sell unwanted items locally. Similar to OfferUp, letgo doesn’t offer a reward for inviting friends. Additionally, the app only demonstrates one method for sending an invitation—email.

Food & Groceries

8. Blue Apron

Subscribers to Blue Apron’s service receive curated boxes with fresh ingredients and instructions on how to cook them into tasty meals.

On top of having a referral program, which rewards customers for getting friends and family to subscribe, Blue Apron also sends their customers free food and invites them to share it with their friends, thus giving them another tool (and conversation piece) that they can use to convince their friends that it’s worth subscribing to the program.

9. Instacart

Customers of Instacart can use the service to get groceries delivered to their homes.

To encourage their users to share Instacart with friends, neighbours, and family, the company offers $10 for every successful referral, which ends up with an order. New users also get $10 when they join through an invitation from a friend.

10. UberEATS

UberEATS uses a referral program to grow its user base, just like its parent company and app. This tactic has helped the company grow to 77 cities.

This referral program is notable for the use of Twitter and WhatsApp as the main channels for sharing the referral offer. While most apps use the most common channels such as email and Facebook, UberEATS provides convenience to its audience by allowing them to use the channels they prefer.

11. Boxed

Boxed helps its customer save on their favorite grocery and personal hygiene products with wholesale pricing.

The mobile app features a referral program with a double-sided $15 reward when a new customer signs up and orders a box worth at least $60.

12. DoorDash

DoorDash is a food delivery service operating in over 300 cities and areas in the US. The referral program offers a straightforward $7 reward for every friend who completes a delivery worth at least $20.

13. Reserve

Reserve allows users to review and book restaurants in several major urban markets in the US. The app includes a standard dual-sided $5 bonus for each successful referral.

14. Yelp Delivery

Yelp is known for its crowd-sourced reviews of restaurants and other public establishments, but the company has been looking to expand its revenue streams. In 2015 Yelp acquired food-ordering service Eat24 and started offering food delivery services through its main app.

Customers who use Yelp’s delivery service can give their friends $5 to use within the app and get the same amount back when they complete their first order.

15. Tropical Smoothie Cafe

Tropical Smoothie Cafe is a franchise that operates over 500 restaurants in the US. The brand has its own rewards app, which customers can use to collect rewards, pay, and order ahead.

The brand encourages referrals by rewarding referrers with $5 once their friends have spent at least $10 at one of the brand’s locations.

16. TabbedOut

TabbedOut calls itself “the easiest way to pay at bars and restaurants.” Customers can use the app to open a tab at participating locations and pay their bill when they are ready to leave without having to wait for a server.

The company incentivizes its user to share the app with friends by offering them a $10 reward for each successful referral.

Travel & Hospitality

17. Airbnb

The referral program takes center stage in Airbnb’s app. The company offers users a double-sided incentive with both the referrer and the recipient getting rewarded.

Airbnb scores extra points for explaining clearly what it takes to get the reward in as few words as possible.

18. Hotel Tonight

Hotel Tonight is on a mission to conquer the hotel bookings market one last-minute deal at a time.

The referral program of Hotel Tonight rewards both sides with $25 off a booking that exceeds $135. This number is carefully calculated to ensure that Hotel Tonight makes money on each referral, thus guaranteeing the sustainability of the program.

19. Uber

Referrals play a major role in Uber’s rise to global dominance in the ride-sharing segment of the travel industry. The referral program takes center stage in the mobile app as well. By calling the program “Free Rides,” Uber creates a natural urge for users to check it out as soon as they see it in the app.

20. Lyft

Lyft is the main competitor to Uber and referral plays an important role in the company’s strategy. Unlike most similar programs, Lyft offers a reward only to referrers.

Integrating customers’ address books in the referral workflow on the app is a smart move by Lyft. Seeing the names of multiple friends makes it more likely that you share the invitation and with more people.

21. Juno

Juno strives to be the ethical alternative to Uber that treats drivers better and provides superior service as a result.

As part of its launch strategy in New York City, the app offers 30% off all rides for 2 weeks to anyone who refers a new customer. Juno’s aggressive take on other ride-sharing apps is matched in its referral program.

Services

22. TaskRabbit

TaskRabbit is a marketplace connecting freelance labor and people who need work done locally. Through the service, customers can find help with everyday tasks such as cleaning, home repairs, assembling furniture, etc.

TaskRabbit features a referral program, which targets those who need help with a particular task. A new user who joins via an invitation from a friend gets $20 off their first task. When they complete it, the referrer also gets $20 credit to use on the platform.

23. Postmates

Postmates has successfully applied Uber’s model to the logistics industry. The company operates a platform, which connects couriers with customers who need goods delivered locally.

Postmates’ regular referral program rewards both sides with $10, but the company is also known for running special offers, such as the one shown below, which incentivizes new customers to use the app actively with a $100 bonus, available only for seven days.

24. Shyp

Shyp offers courier services like Postmates but uses USPS and other major carriers to deliver nationwide. The company has a strong focus on merchants selling through eBay and has even formed a partnership with the platform, which allows merchants there to connect their accounts and ship easily.

Shyp offers a straightforward $5 bonus for both the referrer and referred party. One thing worth pointing out in this example is how the company uses customer-centric language in its app—so, instead of “Invite friends,” it says “Get Free Shipping.”

Finance & Personal Savings

25. PayPal

PayPal prompts users to invite friends from the moment they log into the app. Trying a new app is an exciting moment, and PayPal wants to profit from it by encouraging users to share it with their friends.

The PayPal team clearly feels the value of the app is compelling enough on its own (and has an huge user base close to 200 million), so that they don’t need to offer financial rewards to incentivize people to invite their friends anymore (unlike when they first launched).

26. Robinhood

Robinhood is an app that allows its users to trade shares and index funds commission-free.

Today, the app features a simple program to invite your friends without offering any special rewards in return, but when Robinhood first started the team used the referral program to generate virality by allowing people who invited friends to skip places in the line and get access sooner. The “Copy to Clipboard” is always a great share feature as well!

27. Ebates

Ebates allows its users to collect coupons and earn cash back rewards from over 2,000 stores.

The website features a “Refer a Friend” program, which doesn’t follow the standard features we see in most referral programs. Customers of Ebates have to refer two friends in order to earn a $50 reward. Both friends referred get $10. Referrers can also win an Alaska Cruise as an additional reward.

28. Earny

Earny is an app that goes through the receipts in your inbox, monitors for price drops on the items you bought, and then claims money back on your behalf. The company makes money by keeping 25% of all the funds it manages to recover for its users.

Earny’s referral program works as a profit-sharing model—customers of Earny who refer friends get 5% of their refunds and another 5% from new customers recruited by their friends.

Productivity

29. Evernote

Users of note-taking app Evernote can refer their friends and earn points, which can be exchanged for a monthly or annual Premium subscription. Premium users can participate in the program as well and use their points to extend their subscriptions.

30. Harvest

Harvest is a time tracking tool used by teams and individual professionals alike. Harvest features a “Refer a Friend” program, which gives a one-time $10 discount to both the referee and a friend who upgrades to a paid account. Customers can only use email to share the deal. If you’re only going to have one share channel, email is the right one to choose.

31. Upthere

Upthere is a cloud company that’s looking to make syncing files obsolete. Getting people to use the app longer and to share with their friends are two major factors for driving stickiness in cloud storage apps, so Upthere’s referral program works to encourage both.Users are prompted to invite their friends as soon as they start using the app. Upthere extends the referral program even to trial users and awards them with an extra month of free trial for every new user they manage to recruit. This is a clever move not just because it generates new customers, but it also makes existing users more invested in the app, thus, making them more likely to convert when their trial runs out.

Other

32. Headspace

Headspace helps users find peace of mind with pre-recorded mindfulness exercises.

Headspace users can share ten free sessions with their friends from inside the app. Although this is not a referral reward per se—because everyone can claim ten free sessions as a trial—this is still an interesting case of a referral program, because it uses content as the “reward” that generates new users.

33. Nike+ Run Club

Runners use Nike+ Run Club to track and record their practices, measure their progress, and compare it with their friends.

Having friends to compete against is likely one of the Aha! moments for Nike+ Run Club, so the app does a serious push to find and invite friends.

34. Tile

Tile is a tracker, which attaches to your important personal belongings. It connects to your phone over Bluetooth and helps you find your wallet, keys, and other items easily.

Tile is another brand that has chosen the gamification path for its referral program. Customers who recommend Tile, earn 25 points for each friend who buys a Tile. These points can be exchanged for free Tile products and swag for each 50 points.

Probably the biggest struggle content marketers face is getting insights to flesh out and validate their buyer personas. Helping to gain that insight was the subject of the SiriusDecisions 2017 Summit session “Making Personas Personal: SiriusDecisions Buyer Insights 2017.” In this extremely well-attended session, SiriusDecisions’ Cristina De Martini, research director of marketing operations strategies, and Carrie Rediker, research director of demand creation strategies, shared some of the insights from the SiriusDecisions 2017 B-to-B Buying Study.

Some of the results may surprise you.

As we have all learned, the buying process has evolved to include a variety of different channels and each person takes a different route along the standard buyer’s journey. As our understanding and tools become more sophisticated, we need to understand our personas and their preferences, and give them more power over how they take that journey.

Here’s a look at some of the questions the survey asked and some of the insights that were gleaned from the responses.

How Do Customers Buy?

The foundational decision process framework, based on our human cognitive process, is still valid. Buyers go through the education, solution and selection stages. Before delving into how customers buy, we have to review the three buying scenarios:

• Committee. This is the scenario for larger deals, typically $500,000 and up. Here you’re going to have to sell up through the organization, perhaps to five or more buying centers and six to 10 (or even more) individuals.
• Consensus. From about $50,000 to $500,000, you’ll still have multiple buying centers, but they are more likely to be on the same level in the organization.
• Independent. These smaller deals are typically e-commerce or transactional with a single individual in a short period of time.

To understand how these scenarios play out, it’s critical to create a buyer journey map. Answering some more questions about the buyer’s journey will help us do that.

Is Digital Replacing Human Interaction?

The short answer to this question is no. There is still close to a 50/50 split at each stage of the buyer’s journey. As we develop content, we need digital and human touches. Some interesting insights from these questions included the following:

• The average number of interaction types along the buyer’s journey is 18.
• There is no single tactic that drives closing a deal. It depends on the persona.
• When determining ROI, think across tactics because they all interact with each other.
• When interacting with humans, the vendor sales rep is the number one contact, more than twice as often as other contacts like resellers or analysts.
• Human interaction is preferred at some stage of the buyer’s journey, not only the end. However, when that human interaction comes really depends on the persona.

Now, let’s look at the next question.

What Tactics Should We (As Marketers) Invest In?

It’s always fun to look at tactic trends, but it’s important to remember that those trends may not apply to our target personas. Again, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to content type.

In fact, the tactics personas prefer tend to be evenly distributed. The big “but” is that it varies by persona when to use these tactics. By learning more about what our personas want and when, we can eliminate a lot of wasted time and money on tactics that don’t match their unique journey.

At this point, Cristina and Carrie presented a matrix of delivery of digital versus human and the level of response by type of delivery. At the top right with high human interaction and high response was “orchestrated,” which includes direct vendor engagement, vendor-hosted webinars, meetings with reps, vendor-hosted conferences, and dialog with a reseller or distributor. This had a 32% response rate.

What was interesting is that the top six tactic types for CIOs and line of business executives were the same, but they occurred at different stages of the buyer’s journey. The top six, in order, are:

• Analyst reports: 32%
• Sales presentations: 28%
• Case studies: 22%
• Interactive brochures: 22%
• Articles: 20%
• Static brochures: 16%

This means that case studies or white papers can be used effectively in the education, solution, or selection stage — depending on the persona.

Which brings us to our next question.

What Affects Deal Velocity?

Nearly three quarters of deals get stuck somewhere in the buyer’s journey, the study revealed. What’s more interesting is breaking down the reasons that we, as marketers, can control versus those we can’t. Let’s start with what’s not in our control:

• Budget
• Competing organizational priorities
• Organization’s purchase process

Here’s what we can control:

• How quickly the vendor representative responds to the buyer
• Negotiation on price
• Assets that compare our solution to our competitors’
• Contract reviews

How Do We Apply This New Knowledge?

Here are the key takeaways.

• Personas matter. We need to dig deeper to understand how our buyers buy and preferences in the process.
• We need to leverage data to drive decisions, not rely on intuition.
• We can use data to fill gaps in content asset types.
• Demand generation, operations, and portfolio marketers need to collaborate to create data-driven buyer persona maps for each persona.

How do our customers buy? It all depends. We can start with data from surveys like this study from SiriusDecisions and then doing more research on our target personas. The result will be personas that are personal and let the buyer have a say in the journey.

We all love a good story. Numerous studies have proven that our brains are far more engaged by storytelling than just being presented cold, hard facts. Top brands like Coca Cola, Dove, Warby Parker and Apple harness this science to their advantage through marketing that focuses on the story. It’s a natural fit for consumer-facing companies.

But can B2B marketers achieve the same success with storytelling?

Yes! Business buyers are still people, so a good story will get their attention and make them want to learn more about your products and services. B2B marketers may just have to do a little more creative thinking in order to bring their brands to life. That’s not easy, and a 2016 report by the Content Marketing Institute reveals it’s an area in which B2B content creators want to improve. In fact, 41% of B2B marketers listed “becoming better storytellers” as one of their top five priorities.

In order to be better storytellers, marketers need to shift a little bit of focus away from the data that can easily consume us and remember that customers (no matter whether B2B or B2C – in fact, we like to say that it should be P2P, or people to people) are human beings who crave a good story. Storytelling is actually blurring the lines between B2C and B2B marketing.

At the University of West Florida in Pensacola, Florida, the school’s president saw the need for storytellers to share what the academia was focused on with the public. The Story Lab at UWF’s Innovation Institute was recently formed to bring awareness to the school’s work. Story Lab Creative Director Hadley Higginson and Story Lab Outreach Manager Christian Garman recently shared their own story with the Gulf Coast HUG (HubSpot User Group).

The presentation “The Story Behind Story” covered the basics of storytelling that are often forgotten.

Who is your audience?

Before it’s possible to tell a good story, you need to know who you are telling it to. This may sound like common sense, but as a B2B inbound marketing agency, we still encounter companies who haven’t yet identified their buyer personas. And if you do have them as part of your inbound marketing strategy, it might be time to revisit them if they aren’t focused on the right person doing the research for your products and services.

What do we want them to feel, think & do?

Once you’ve identified your audience, Higginson and Garman say there are some key things to remember when crafting your story:

1. People will only remember 3 to 5 things from your ad, blog, etc., if you’re lucky. The message you are delivering has to be specific and memorable.
2. Focus on passion and purpose in your message. Then repeat.
3. Always tell the truth. Authenticity is key. Garman shared a story from his days as a meteorologist at the local ABC affiliate. “I would give the forecast for the weekend which people counted on to make plans. Sometimes, I’d get it wrong and so I’d go on the air and apologize on Monday. Management didn’t like it, but the public thought it was cool. People sent email after email saying how much they appreciated me admitting when I was wrong,” said Garman.
4. Make it conversational. Talk the story out, but don’t talk in science terms, make it as conversational as possible. This is definitely a trap B2B marketers can easily fall into and one we like to call speaking tech-lish.
5. Don’t be boring. As a content marketing agency that focuses on creating performance content for unglamorous industries, we work to fight against the “boring” industry stigma every day for our clients. We know that even the most technical, regulated or typically unglamorous industries can create content that inspires and excites audiences.

Higginson and Garman reminded us that great storytelling connects us to each other, spreads ideas, changes minds, and creates a powerful ripple effect. But you don’t have to have a multi-million dollar budget to tell a good story. Marketers can use stories to transform traditional forms of content such as white papers, case studies and blogs. Use that impressive data that you have in your case study but include a compelling client story to back it up. Tell stories that will resonate with readers in your blog posts, and in white papers that explain how your products and services work, don’t just relate them to your customer, tell your customers how their customers will benefit.

Here we go again. 

This week, Microsoft announced the new Surface Pro, the successor to the well-received Surface Pro 4 laptop/tablet hybrid. And Apple is rumored to be working on an updated iPad Pro, which could be introduced as soon as its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in early June. 

All of this means we're in for another round of angst and confusion over whether or not a tablet could ever replace your laptop, even as we get closer to back-to-school PC shopping season. 

And this go-round, the debate is further complicated by the fact that Microsoft is insisting the new Surface Pro isn't a tablet at all, but rather "the most versatile laptop" — despite the fact that the $799 device doesn't come with its trademark Type Cover keyboard, adding at least another $129 to the price if you actually want to use it as a laptop. 

So here is a very simple way to think about it that might help: It doesn't matter if a tablet can replace your laptop. The lines between phones and tablets and PCs are blurring enough that these kinds of distinctions are increasingly meaningless. Instead, ask yourself: "Can this device do what I need it to do?"  

An academic problem

Consider this: Samsung's newest Galaxy S8 shipped alongside an accessory called the DeX, which is a dock that lets you hook the phone up to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and use it like it's a PC. But is it a PC? Or is it a phone? Similarly, if you have a Microsoft Surface Book laptop, and you detach the screen to make it a tablet, is it still a laptop? 

These questions are interesting adventures into philosophy, but still, ultimately, kind of pointless. Sometimes you use it as a phone, but sometimes you use it as a PC. Sometimes your laptop is a tablet. It's no big deal.

It's just about how you like to use it: If you like to sketch, a Surface-style hybrid might be for you. If you love iMessage, go Mac or iPad. There are options optimized for gaming, for portability, and for battery life. They all have their drawbacks, but there's a lot of choice.

And, nowadays, the vast majority of apps are available for all the common operating systems. Maybe you prefer Microsoft Word on the Windows PC to Microsoft Word on the iPad or Android phone, but it's all still Microsoft Word. Even Apple had to release a version of Apple Music for Android to reach the maximum number of users.

So ultimately, it comes down to preference. One of my colleagues, Dave Smith, used an iPad as his main work computer for years, thanks to its great battery life and snappy performance. Recently, I really loved the versatility of the Microsoft Surface Studio, which goes between gigantic PC and gigantic tablet seamlessly. 

Really, there's an embarrassment of riches out there. With the PC industry shrinking, it's actually a boom time for exceptional, exciting, versatile, and sometimes just plain weird computers. So buy what you like, and what works for your needs, and don't worry too much about the marketing.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft explains how the new Surface Pro will compete with Apple — and why it's not calling it a tablet anymore

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Hands-on with Microsoft's newest laptop that's taking on Google and Apple

When your business needs to increase revenue, where is the first place you look?

If you’re like many businesses, you focus the bulk of your time and budget on acquiring new customers.

While new business is an important part of creating a profitable business, it’s probably not the best use of your time and money.

What if you spent more time focusing on your most valuable resource?

Your existing customers.

Concentrating on customer retention and encouraging repeat customers creates long-lasting, profitable relationships.

Here are five reasons why you should focus your efforts on repeat business:

1. Repeat customers spend more money

300 percent more, according to RjMetrics.

Not only are your repeat customers purchasing more over time than new customers, they likely trust you enough to purchase your more expensive products or services.

2. Repeat customers are easier to sell to

You have limited time and resources; you don’t want to waste them on potential customers who never end up buying anything.

Keep in mind, when you’re marketing to a prospective customer, you only have a 13 percent chance of persuading them to make a purchase.

However, things change when you market to a repeat customer. Repeat customers have a sixty to seventy percent chance of buying.

Don’t waste time spinning your wheels without getting results.

3. New customers cost you more

If you’re a small business, you need to save money anywhere you can.

It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current customer.

Bringing that new customer to the spending level of your current customers costs 16 times more.

Spend your limited money where you know it will get the most impact.

4. Repeat customers promote your business

Marketing can be expensive.

And hiring brand ambassadors? Nearly impossible for most small businesses.

But what if your ambassadors didn’t cost you a penny?

By focusing on repeat business, you’ll create a group of loyal customers that will happily say your praises and promote your business.

Repeat customers refer 50 percent more people than one-time buyers.

Hint: Attract referrals through email marketing with our five-step method.

5. Businesses are built on customer retention

Your business shouldn’t be a revolving door of customers.

By increasing customer retention just five percent, a company’s profitability will increase by an average of 75 percent.

When you imagine future success, picture strengthening existing relationships rather than forging new ones. After all, 80 percent of future profits come from 20 percent of current customers.

Investing in repeat business costs you less and makes you more.

The result? Your business prospers with less stress and effort.

How can you start driving repeat business? Email marketing is the easiest way to reach your existing customers and encourage them to shop with you again.

If I were to visit your website, would I find a collection of social media icons I can click on to go to your company page on each of the most popular networks? Would I find the pages fairly active with summaries and links to your blog articles and press releases? Would I see that you have a healthy number of followers and many of your employees have their personal profiles connected to your page? If I looked at your profile or that of your CEO or top sales people or thought leaders would I see status updates–usually in the form of automatic posting of blog articles? Would I run across you occasionally in a group?

Did I just describe your social media program?

If your answer is yes, congratulations. You’ve made it to the 2^nd phase of social media participation. Think of it as brand maintenance. You’re ahead of many B2B companies and right in there with > 80% of those companies that have organized LinkedIn programs.

Here’s some reality: you’re not going to generate many leads this way, and you’re missing a big opportunity–especially on LinkedIn.

Why brand maintenance doesn’t generate leads

There’s a faulty assumption in the planning and implementation of programs, like the one I describe above. These brand maintenance programs assume viable new business prospects and influencers are so interested in what you’re doing they’ll actively look for your stuff among the jillions of status updates and blog article group postings they face every time they log onto LinkedIn.

In most cases, unless you already have an enormous following and probably don’t need a social media lead generation program, this just isn’t true.

In reality, if you want to connect with qualified potential customers or clients, strategic partners, industry influencers, or the media and generate offline conversations for your business development or sales team, you’re going to have to work a little harder.

What’s missing from LinkedIn programs

Most B2B LinkedIn programs don’t generate leads because they’re too passive and lack key components that lead to real results. Take a look at any truly successful LinkedIn demand generation program. Here’s a list of the critical elements you’ll find.

• Just like any other marketing program, a productive LinkedIn program needs a strategy and a plan for execution. This strategy includes measurable, sales-supporting goals and objectives, an understanding of who you are targeting with this program, identification of a LinkedIn team (marketing, sales, subject matter experts, executives), positioning and messaging and a method of evaluating program performance.
• With greater than 450 million members, there is simply too much noise on LinkedIn to sit back and hope buyers find your status updates. Instead, you need to locate your target audience and reach out often–with connection invitations, one-on-one messages and group communication.
• Nurturing/development: Just like in the non-LinkedIn world, the vast majority of potential buyers are not yet ready for a conversation when they first engage with you. And, just like in the non-LinkedIn world, a vast majority of those people are going to buy eventually. It will be from the people who stay in touch in a non-annoying, helpful way. To be effective from a sales and marketing perspective, a LinkedIn program needs a prospect development component.
• Hands-off: Relationships can be established and grown on LinkedIn, but this is not where the sale is finalized. The ultimate goal of a good LinkedIn program is to move the relationship off of LinkedIn and into your marketing funnel or onto the call calendar of your sales people.

Back to brand maintenance

This is not to say that brand maintenance programs don’t have value. Every company should have one. If a prospect does come looking for you, they’ll find professional-looking pages, indications of active participation, and lots of employees represented on the network. This is good because prospects will check you out at various stages of the buying process and these are things they’ll be looking for.

Just don’t wait around to count the leads.

Forward to lead generation

I’ll say it again. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, it’s simply not aggressive enough to sit back and wait for prospects to find and read your status updates. Marketers and sales reps who are willing to push their programs to actively tap into the LinkedIn network will find it to be a tremendous source of the highest quality leads.

“What is demand generation? Is it different from inbound marketing? How?”

“Why do I keep hearing this term? It sounds like something I should know about…”

Believe me, if you’re reading this article, you already do know about demand generation. You just might not know you know.

Y’know?

This guide will take apart and examine the three pillars of demand generation. I’lll also give you a 7-step walkthrough for how you can start rolling with demand generation today.

Demand generation strategies have driven most of Wishpond’s growth in the past few years. Advertising and PR are great, but since 2013 we’ve prioritized the demand gen strategies I’ll go over in this guide.

So this is something I’m really excited about, and know can have high-impact on your business as well.

Click below to navigate the guide.

What is Demand Generation?

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That’s a great question, and one we should get out of the way as soon as possible…

Demand Generation encompasses the marketing strategies designed to drive awareness and interest in a business’ products.

It’s an umbrella term which encompasses social media, inbound marketing, email marketing, real-world marketing and customer retention strategies.

It does not cover advertising or PR.

There’s two points in that demand generation definition that I’d like to pull out and take a look at before we get started:

1. “Drive Awareness”

Part of generating demand for your business’ product is about driving awareness of the fact that you exist.

This can be done through content marketing and SEO, social media, community outreach, affiliate marketing and more.

2. “Drive Interest”

Once people are aware you exist, you need to have a secondary strategy in place to communicate your value.

I don’t care that Salesforce is extremely well-known. If I don’t need a CRM platform (or don’t believe I do), why would I care?

Driving interest can also be done through all the strategies above, but it also involves the other side of demand generation – email marketing and customer retention.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, let’s get rolling with our Guide to Demand Generation…

Demand Generation: Strategies to Reach New Prospective Customers

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The strategies I’ll go over in this section are designed to get your business in front of people who might be interested in buying your products.

This can, of course, also be done with Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and a solid public relations strategy. But, for the purposes of this guide (and to align ourselves with the whole idea of demand generation), we’ll ignore those and focus instead on the three most impactful demand generation strategies to drive awareness.

Social Media

Social media, if invested in correctly and optimized (with management tools, visual marketing apps, and a well-measured approach, can be profitable without having to pay for exposure.

It’s a challenge, though, for sure. The organic reach on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest are extremely limited (as the platforms are encouraging businesses to pay-to-play).

Here’s what I recommend to get organic reach and brand awareness on social media:

• Choose a couple social platforms on which to focus your time and energy. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
• To get rolling, start off with frequent social media promotions to increase your number of Fans and Followers. Use social incentives (bonus entry rewards for Liking or Sharing your promotion) to spread the word and get more Followers. Exclude past entrants from your targeted posts when promoting a new campaign.
• Measure the success you see on social media with a comprehensive analytics tool (either within your social media management tool or the platform itself). Measure how much time you’re spending and the dollar value of engagement you receive. Remember that social media, like content marketing is a long-game. It takes several months for anything to happen (though social promotions can help you get a boost).

To learn more about social media marketing, including when you shouldn’t invest in it (and where you should invest), as well as how you can get started, check out my article, “Social Media Marketing Plan: An 11-Step Template.” To see a full guide to the tools necessary to make it profitable, check out “50 Social Media Tools: The Ultimate List 2017.”

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a huge part of driving awareness about, and generating demand for, your business.

Imagine the content you create as a megaphone. When you start out, without content, your business is only able to whisper into the buying world. As you create more and more content, your voice gets a bit louder – because you’re more likely to be found, more successful on social media, and because the more content you create the more respect you’ll get from Google.

STEP 1: SEO

When we’re talking about the content marketing strategies to reach new prospective customers, we’re primarily talking about content’s role in SEO.

SEO, very simply, comprises the strategies that businesses use to get their brand on the first page of search results when someone types in something related to them.

How to start ranking and generating awareness of your brand through search results:

• Identify key words and phrases associated with your business. For Wishpond’s marketing campaign software, we target tool searches, questions associated with how to use tools like ours, and queries associated with strategies which use our tools.
• Identify what the competition is for your keywords. If a given keyword is dominated by a competitor, create better content than what they’re produced (longer, higher density of keywords, etc) or go for lower-hanging fruit. Tools like LongTail Pro and BuzzSumo can help identify the types of content you should be creating.
• Start creating content with those key phrases as the URL and interspersed frequently throughout the content.
• Create long-form, high-quality content.

STEP 2: PROMOTION:

A big part of content marketing is also promotion. Become more active on communities like Reddit, GrowthHackers.com, Inbound.org and those which are most relevant to your business.

Tap into influencer marketing to increase the organic reach of your content. For a guide, check out “Influence Marketing: How to Amplify Your Content with Social Leaders.”

STEP 3: USING CONTENT TO GENERATE LEADS:

Content marketing is only valuable if you’re able to turn traffic into customers. And once you’re driving readers, for many businesses that means turning those readers into leads.

For a guide to using content to generate leads, check out “The Complete Guide to Gating your Content.”

To learn more about content marketing and how you can build a more powerful inbound strategy, check out my article, “How to Build a More Complete Content Marketing Strategy.” You can also grab a high-value tools guide with “77 Tremendous Tools to Make You a Content Marketing Superstar.”

Real-World Marketing

Real-world marketing still has a place in getting your business out there. Conferences, local meet-ups, job fairs – all these can showcase your business to the people who are there – and therein lies the problem of real-world marketing.

If your business is new on the stage, you need to implement strategies designed to show you to as much of that stage as possible.

This is the problem I see with a lot of early-stage, well-funded tech startups (and perhaps why so many of them fail): If you have a bunch of VC money, you’re going to hire the marketing team with the most proven experience.

Unfortunately, that often means you’re hiring people who haven’t had to “break into” their industry. If they have that experience you want, they’re likely corporate marketers who have marketed businesses who are already well-known to the entire business stage. They’re not breaking onto it, needing to try innovative strategies to be seen. They’re people who need to keep their brand top-of-mind – people who need to give buyers a reason to go with their well-known brand over a well-known competitor.

And that’s why digital marketing and the strategies of growth hacking are so powerful. They allow you reach a massive audience with a limited budget. Yes, it’s scarier, but it’s also more powerful in the early stages.

Then again, I’m a startup marketer, so I’m as biased as they come…

Demand Generation: Strategies to Engage Prospective Customers

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Now we really get into the nitty-gritty of demand generation – actually generating demand for your business. Creating awareness is only 1/3rd of the battle, we still need to get people to actually buy and then stay with us for more than a week or first purchase.

Let’s dive into those strategies which convince people who know who we are that our product is worth buying. Let’s dive into the strategies which get people to buy. After all, why else are we here?

Content Marketing

Once you’ve created a content funnel based around SEO, promotion and lead generation, you can continue to use it to generate demand for your tools.

Incorporate your content, including how-to guides, case studies, platform walkthroughs, video, “about us-style” pieces and more, into your email marketing campaigns which turn prospective customers (leads) into paying customers.

Content plays a major role in building trust and a relationship with prospective customers. After all, I’m far more likely to buy from someone I know – far more likely to buy from someone I trust.

Here’s an example of an article from the CEO and founder of Buffer, in which he is completely open about why a couple of the other co-founders are moving on:

To learn more about using content marketing to engage with the prospective customers who already know you check out my article on Content Marketing Institute, “Transparency Reveals Great Content Opportunity.”

Email Marketing

Before we dive into how you can use email marketing and where it fits within the demand generation sphere, I think it’s worth it to introduce you to a few statistics…

• For every $1 spent on email marketing, some businesses can get an average return of $38.
• People are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook.
• 72% of consumers would rather receive email than any other source of business communication.
• 61% of consumers are happy to receive promotional emails on a weekly basis, so long as those emails actually deliver value.
• Personalized emails (even the ones which you automate) receive transaction rates that are six times higher than others.

Sources: Emailmonday, Forrester, MarketingSherpa, MarketingLand

In short, email isn’t dead.

Here’s a few best practices that will enable you to succeed with email marketing right off the bat:

• Personalize where possible. It’s going to very quickly become impossible for you to send an email to every one of your prospective customers, but the more personal you can be the higher your response rates and the more frequently people will convert to a paid purchase. As a result, it’s worth learning how to incorporate merge tags and liquid code as soon as possible.
• Automate where possible. Your sales team might be able to, predominantly, email customers and prospective customers manually. But getting people from blog subscriber to sales lead takes a serious effort. My recommendation is to use a email automation tool to help you set up triggered workflows and drip campaigns which automatically turn new prospective customers into sales leads.
• Segment. Let’s say you write on a couple different blog topics (like Wishpond, who writes on more advanced growth marketing stuff as well as social media). It’s far more effective for us to email growth marketing subscribers content which is relevant to them and their business’ goals than it is to email them everything about a new Twitter algorithm.

Here’s a snapshot of a few of Wishpond’s own segments, including our three newsletter segments:

To dive into email marketing, particularly the automation side of it, check out “10 Steps to Email Automation Success.” We also have a resource giving you 19 of our highest-performing email marketing templates.

Demand Generation: Strategies to Engage Existing Customers

You need to keep people engaged with your platform or product to keep the demand for it high. Whatever your product is, it needs to be valuable enough to buyers that they keep coming back.

For software, this is done with several elements (which I’ll go over in this section). But, in general, think of it as based around three primary factors:

1. Education: If your users don’t know how to use your tool or service, they won’t see the value in it. For some software providers, especially, this may mean you need to require people attend a training call.
2. Value: If your users don’t get value from your tool, they won’t re-subscribe the next time they’re prompted.
3. Positive Opinion: If users don’t like you or have a negative experience when they interact with you, they’ll leave far faster than if they have the same experience of the tool but a positive relationship. This is where customer success and customer support work.

Let’s break down a few actionable strategies you can use to better onboard users and keep customer retention high.

Customer Onboarding

The first few weeks (or months, in some industries) are the most worrisome for any business. Once you get people over that hurdle of signing up, you need to ensure their first few experiences with you are positive ones.

This is where user onboarding comes in.

Here’s an example of a questionnaire we’re testing, which would show as soon as people enter our platform.

Information given to us from this questionnaire (it’d be five concurrent forms) allows us to better understand what our users are looking to achieve and frames how we can contact them.

Here’s an example of the video which shows up as soon as someone arrives in our landing page builder. It gives them a 26-minute walkthrough on everything they need to know about our tool:

For more on user onboarding, check out the fantastic resources at UserOnboard.com. You can also check out (and download) the emails we send our new users at “19 Proven Email Marketing Templates We Use to Sell, Nurture, Onboard, and Reach Out.”

Customer Retention

Customer retention is all about ensuring that your customers enjoy their experience with your platform or product. Keeping their demand for your product high is as important as getting them to use it in the first place.

And there’s a few elements of this…

1. A Strong Product:

Nothing else matters if your product or tool sucks. No customer support team is possibly awesome enough to make people happy if they can’t use your software or hate your UX.

Here’s an example from our own landing page builder, with everything visible, large buttons and clear choices:

2. A Strong Brand: This is actually a big one. I know I kind of belittled those corporate marketers who focus only on brand reputation over brand growth, but once you hit a few customers you need to put a bit of time into what they think of you as a company.

I’ll use your tool if it’s awesome, even if I don’t know who you are. But I’m less likely to stick around if you have a bit of downtime, I experience a bug, or I’m disappointed by a new feature.

Users are more likely to forgive their friends than they are a faceless company who has never responded to their emails.

A big part of this can be social media, particularly Instagram. Here’s an example from Hootsuite where they showcase their brand identity:

And here’s an example from Buffer, whose transparency efforts go a long way to create trust with their customers:

3. Customer Support:

This is a no-brainer. Your support team needs to be competent. They need to know your system, know your product. And that doesn’t just include the FAQs.

A good support team has more training sessions than any other team in your company. And don’t just fob this off to your most recent recent college grad. These are the people who have the most contact with your existing users, and the most potential to stop them if they want to leave.

Pay these people.

Note: A huge part of a successful customer support team is communication. If your growth team decides to run a pricing page test, your support guys need to know before it’s run. Otherwise, when they’re approached with someone asking “Yesterday I saw your product as being 49.99. Why is it now 54.99?” they won’t know how to answer. This might seem like a no-brainer, but creating solid lines of communication between product development, marketing, sales and your customer support team isn’t something to skip over.

4. Customer Success:

Whether through mandatory demos, extensive email onboarding, in-platform tool-tips or a comprehensive help center (or all of those things), you need to be showing and telling your users exactly how they can find success with your platform.

They won’t last half an hour if they don’t succeed.

Here’s an example of an automatic chat window which is shown to our platform users as soon as they launch a landing page:

How to Start Rolling with Demand Generation

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Here’s a 7-step walkthrough of actionable steps you can take today to start with demand generation for your new business.

Step 1: Start with a website you love

Start by establishing a website that you want people to see.

Don’t attend a single conference unless you know that the card you hand over has a website URL which you’ll be proud people visit.

Your website is the face of your business online. Don’t go to any parties (including advertising, blogging, PR, anything) until that face is a smiling one.

Step 2: Get rolling with blogging

Even if nobody is reading your content for the first few months, you’re establishing a digital footprint (we could get into domain authority and SEO for years, but I’d recommend you buy SEO for Dummies and go from there instead).

Step 3: Start engaging on social media networks and with online communities in your industry.

The place to start with social media really is a social promotion. There’s no better way to build your Follower list quickly and start generating engagement.

For communities, check out Wikipedia’ list of virtual communities or social networking sites to see what’s relevant to your sector.

Step 4: Start building your list

Add a list-building plugin to your blog. Create content that people might want to subscribe to.

A great strategy for this is to do something similar to Groove’s “Journey to 100k,” where they released a weekly article tracking the strategies they used to they grow.

Step 5: Start creating email-gated content

This is a big part of building your list beyond subscribers. Check out my Complete Guide to Gating your Content for a comprehensive look.

Step 6: Automate

For a while, you can do your outreach manually, but (hopefully) that’ll quickly become impossible.

Use a marketing or email automation platform to make it easier for you to effectively email your subscribers and prospective customers.

Check out “How to Create Email Drip Campaigns to Nurture Leads” for more on automating email.

Step 7: Optimize

Once you’ve started to automate, you officially have a sales funnel in place.

You’re creating content which is driving traffic; you’re collecting lead and contact data from email-gated content or a subscriber list; and you’re emailing that list either with information that encourages them to buy or a prompt to get on a call.

So you need to start thinking about optimizing that funnel.

This is where A/B testing and site optimization comes into play.

For a walkthrough on how we optimize our site and drive reliable growth, take a look at my article “How We Drive Massive Growth by Running Calculated, High-Risk Tests.”

To learn more about how to structure your sales funnel, check out “The Foundational Guide to Your Online Marketing and Sales Funnel.” For a walkthrough on creating a sales funnel focused on content marketing, you can read “A Proven Blueprint for Creating a Sales Funnel with Content.” For optimization, check out “The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization.”

Wrapping it Up

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Hopefully this article has given you a better idea of what demand generation is and how you can use it to grow your business.

It’s a pretty massive topic, but I hope I’ve covered it and illuminated some of the confusion you had.

If you have any questions whatsoever about any of the tactics or strategies you’ve seen in this article, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comment section!

No sales representative enjoys marking an opportunity as “closed-lost.” After days, weeks or months of working with a lead, the lead reports that they have decided to go with another option. While sales reps may be frustrated with the lead, closed-lost deals are an important part of the sales process. From another perspective, a closed-lost opportunity is a valuable source of information about what has gone wrong in the sales cycle.

Interviewing the closed-lost lead about what went wrong can provide valuable insight. While one client may not provide enough information to make major changes to the sales funnel, surveying all recent closed-lost deals may illuminate a weak part of the sales process. Identifying where and why leads are lost can help managers find solutions. Although it may feel awkward at first, it benefits the business to work through a closed-lost interview.

The Art of Interviewing a Closed-Lost Opportunity

A sales rep can take many approaches to conducting a closed-lost interview. However, the best approach depends on the business’s situation. For a small business (or one that sells in low quantities), it may be beneficial to conduct a detailed interview. Sales reps often have an idea where the closed-lost deal went sour. They can use these hypotheses to craft a series of ten or less questions to test which guess was correct. In the best case scenario, a third-party can contact the closed-lost lead to conduct this interview. However, sometimes companies don’t have those resources and may have to conduct the interview through a sales rep. A detailed response can be a boon to smaller companies because it provides a lot of information from a single closed-lost lead. This method is recommended when a company doesn’t sell in high enough volume to benefit from an approach that aggregates data from multiple closed-lost deals.

However, a larger company (or one that sells less expensive products at high volume) may benefit from another, less intensive, interviewing approach. Sometimes a sales rep’s time is better spent talking to new leads, rather than crafting questions. Instead of conducting a detailed interview, businesses can send out a survey asking why the lead chose not to continue through the sales process. One tactic is to send a list of common reasons why the lead decided not to purchase. While one response may be helpful, this approach is often more insightful in aggregate. Once 20 or more closed-lost leads have responded to the survey, the business can get a pulse on where the sales cycle is falling short of a lead’s expectations. If multiple responses are similar, managers know there is an issue with a particular sales process.

Incorporating Closed-Lost Feedback into the Sales Funnel

In a perfect world, leads would proceed continuously through the sales funnel, always moving closer to the inevitable closing of the deal. Unfortunately, most sales funnels tend to be more leaky than the ideal. Leads leak out (and become closed-lost opportunities) at different stages of the sales funnel. Taking the time to interview these closed-lost opportunities gives managers and sales reps an opportunity to pinpoint and plug the biggest leaks.

In an example, a subscription software as a service (SaaS) company is conducting a survey of closed-lost opportunities. In gathering the data, they notice that many of the closed-lost opportunities are closing at the conversion from the free trial to the paid subscription. The survey shows that many of the closed-lost leads cited “price” as a reason for leaving the sales funnel. With this key information, sales managers could push for a new, cheaper level of service for these types of customers. The information provided by the closed-lost deals could open the door to new differentiated product offerings.

Still working through the example, sales reps can take this information into the prospecting sales phase. When talking with new leads, sales reps can show how the company has responded to customer feedback by incorporating a new product level. Sales reps might even have enough information from the survey to be able to target this new product offering to leads similar to those who were closed-lost opportunities. A new product may also enable sales reps to match these prospects with the right offer. The benefits of the information derived from the closed-lost deal interviews don’t stop at the managerial level. Sales reps have valuable new ways to talk to sales prospects based upon that learning.
Closed-lost deals still hold value for businesses, if sales representatives take the time to learn about why the deal fell through. Interviewing and surveying these lost leads can help sales managers understand weaknesses in the sales funnel. If leads are often lost at the same point, management can use this information to propose new processes or products to address the leak in the sales funnel. Sales reps can then reach out to sales prospects with this information which can aid in targeting new prospects with the right offer. Closed-lost deals, if handled correctly, don’t have to be a complete loss.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

People generally have one of two relationships with deadlines, they either love them, and use them to be more productive. Or they hate them, ignore them, avoid them, or are terrified by them. The former is usually the more productive group. While productivity is normally defined as more units of output with the same or less units of input, the only thing we’ll mess with or alter in this post, is we will look at the units of input as being time.

I have spoken about time in the past, time being the only non-renewable resource we have in sales, squeezing more out of each second, leads to more sales success. The other things I have spoken a lot about here is the importance of next steps, real next steps, not wishful planning. Think of these two critical elements as the two lines you want to paint your sales between.

While there are the obvious deadlines that sellers deal with, month, quarter or year ends. I think it is important that sellers set more immediate and shorter deadlines. Many will worry about the whole sale, which often prevents them doing all the things or key things that need to today, now (as soon as you’ve read this). Break down your sales to specific points that have to be accomplished along the way, things without which there will be no sale, not big things, but things that have to be in place.

This is where next steps are key. They allow you to break down big steps, into much more bite sized, read doable steps, without the distraction of what’s looming beyond the next step, because let’s be real, if you don’t achieve this immediate next step, there ain’t no sale beyond. While there should always be an overarching strategy and plan for the opportunity/account, there should also be one for each step along the way. Most sales people find it easier to articulate their big plan, but find it difficult to articulate what HAS to be done next, and how the will actually do to make that happen.

Deadlines force you to focus. Setting deadlines for small incremental steps, lead to not only an action plan, but an execution plan; and we all know that success in sales is all about execution, everything else is just talk, and in the absence of action, there is always a lot of talk. The ticking of a clock does amazing job of either turning talk in to action, or missing the deadline when time rolls over you.

Once you master self-imposed deadlines, you will see that they not only are effective for the driving success in individual sales meetings, but you’ll begin to actually set deadlines within meetings. If you know you need to have three things in place with a prospect for them to agree on your next step, and you have a 60-minute meeting scheduled, set deadlines for that within the meeting. You’ll find that this will help you focus on only those things that drive that point, and usually makes your prospect much more engaged because you are focused forward looking, and forward moving.

Deadlines drown out distractions. It is amazing the clarity of thought many experience when they set specific timeline and deadlines. While deadlines imposed by others are not always pleasant, self-imposed deadlines, will make you more productive in the way outlined at the top of this post.

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The post Deadlines Drive Deals appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

In the past 30 years, I’ve listened to a lot of smart sales leaders and experts tell me breakup emails are effective.

I respect these people deeply -- but none of them have ever convinced me. If it were up to me, salespeople would never send breakup emails.

How Breakup Emails Work (In Theory)

Quick summary to make sure we’re on the same page: A rep sends a breakup email after she’s attempted to contact her prospect several times with no response. She writes, “I haven’t heard from you, so I assume this isn’t a priority. If you don’t answer, I’ll take you off my list.”

A very small percentage of buyers -- maybe one or two -- will reply apologetically:

“Sorry for not responding, I’ve been slammed. It’s not a good time right now, but maybe try me again next quarter.”

The salesperson responds, “No problem, I’m glad to hear from you. I’ll reach out in August.”

She puts that opportunity back in her pipeline for August. At this point, she’s feeling great about the breakup email. It worked -- at least if you define success as getting a reply.

Yet when August rolls around and the rep tries to get the ball rolling again with the customer, he’s still not interested.

The Net Results of Breakup Emails

I see zero benefits to sending breakup emails.

You might get replies -- in fact, reps always tell me they get their highest response rate from breakup emails -- but you’re not actually closing deals.

During my first years in selling, I worked at a brokerage firm where the common practice was to leave customers voicemails in a grave tone:

“Hi David, it’s very important I hear back from by the end of the day. I can be reached at [number].”

The seriousness combined with the ambiguity almost always resulted in call-backs. But did those people become customers? No. As soon as they realized what the call was about, they hung up.

The end result of sending a breakup email versus not sending one is the same: No opportunity.

And there are significant downsides.

First, this approach makes you look desperate. You’re “breaking up” with someone who’s already breaking up with you. In addition, it makes the power dynamic even more imbalanced. The buyer wonders why you’re spending so much time and energy on them when they haven’t indicated any interest. They’ll decide your product isn’t valuable or your services aren’t in-demand.

Neediness is the nail in a salesperson’s coffin. Prospects won’t take you seriously, let alone buy your offering.

Second, you’re sabotaging yourself with the buyers who don’t respond. Let’s say you send 100 breakup emails over 12 months. Five to 15 prospects write back, “I’m sorry, call me later.”

That means 85% of your recipients are thinking something like, “Why won’t this person get the hint? Stop sending me sales emails.”

In time, many of these buyers will become better fits for your product -- maybe they change jobs, get promoted, discover an emerging problem, or launch a new program or project. But because you’ve created a bad name for yourself, you probably won’t be their first (or even their fourth) choice.

Which brings me to my third point: Do you truly want to remove these prospects from your pipeline forever?

Of course not. You want to reach out again next quarter to see if their situation has changed. When buyers get your email a few months down the line, they’ll know your breakup email was just a bluff.

When to send breakup emails

If you must, you should only send breakup emails when you have an existing relationship with the prospect. If you’ve been emailing a prospect you’ve never actually connected with -- you have no relationship to break up from, so a breakup email won’t mean anything to them.

The Best Alternative to Sending Breakup Emails

During every sales training, I give reps the same message: The leads you’re working aren’t yours. They belong to your company. It’s an honor to care for the leads you’ve been provided with, so do it with dignity.

If you don't want to poison your company’s reputation and ability to work with future customers, don’t send breakup emails.

You might be wondering what you should do instead.

I suggest nothing.

After several attempts with no response, put the buyer on a list of contacts you’ll try again on a future date.

I often find that when a rep reaches back out in several months, her prospect will say, “You tried to reach me earlier in the year -- I’m sorry I never got back to you. We’ve had some changes since then. I’d like to learn more about your product.”

The salesperson can respond, “Don’t apologize. I email hundreds of people, so I don’t remember the ones I sent you. I’m glad we’re talking now.”

Not only does this reply put the buyer at ease, it also makes the rep seem confident, controlled, and credible.

Chasing a prospect is inherently risky: It puts your perceived authority and power in danger. There’s no way you should compound that loss with pushy tactics like sending a breakup email.

Other Alternatives to the Breakup Email

Start a new thread

When a conversation stalls with a prospect, try starting a new thread over a new event. Pick an event that’s relevant to them or their company, such as, “I saw a press announcement your company will be at Trade Show X this summer. Will you be attending?” Let your prospect know they don’t have to feel guilty for not calling back and give them an open door to walk through.

Ask for help

If a deal is humming along and the prospect stops responding, I’ll ask another rep or manager to engage on my behalf. They reach out to the prospect as if they aren’t aware the deal has stalled. A simple message like, “I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback on the demo you had recently. What’s your availability this afternoon?”

Salespeople don’t walk into a room with a lot of weight, so we can’t give away more than we have. If a prospect doesn’t respond after a week, we both know they’ve lost interest. But, because you haven’t said the words, I’ll have my boss follow up where we left off.

The prospect never said they didn’t want to do business me, so having my manager or colleague reach out pushes for either a “Yes” or a “No” and allows me to discern how to move forward.

Go around the prospect

The most extreme next step is to go around the prospect. But before I advise someone to take this action, I ask them to imagine what they would have done to avoid being in this position. It’s wise not to lean on this strategy too often -- and to get to the root of why you’re faced with this challenge in the first place.

And remember, if you’re in this situation, it’s likely nothing will save the deal. If you go around a prospect, start by sending them some information.

It might be marketing collateral that’s only available internally, but it should be designed purely for breakups. Send the white paper or case study and ask the prospect to call when they’re done reading it.

What do you think: Are you a believer in breakup emails? If you can show me one piece of data that this technique pays off, I might change my mind. Please leave your opinion in the comments so we can get a thoughtful discussion going.

Looking to go deeper into efficient and effective prospecting techniques? Check out dates and locations for my prospecting workshops. Learn more.

Learning how to negotiate salary can be a game changer. Sales is one of the most exciting industries in the world.

If you understand how people operate, you can learn to sell anything. Being able to get around objections and move people to close is a skill set that can earn great money.

That said, the pay for reps is all over the map. 100% commission, salary + bonus, and (the most common) salary + commission.

Unfortunately, the pay structure we see most often can depreciate over time—making it necessary to learn how to negotiate salary.

Much like the things you sell every day, this will take some skills (many of which you already have).

The difference being that the product is you and the customer is your employer and that means you’ll need to consider both before entering the arena and coming out the other side with the raise you (hopefully) deserve.

In today’s post, we’ll talk about the three stages of learning how to negotiate salary including:

• Pre-Conversation
• Conversation
• Post-Conversation

How to Negotiate Salary: The “Prep” Stage

A few factors need to be considered before you ever call the meeting with the person in charge of your money.

Personal Reflection

Ok, I’m sure you’re a fine salesperson. But do you really deserve a raise?

There will need to be a little introspection to see whether or not you’ve been pulling more weight than your bank account says.

1. Know and Hit Your Numbers: Check to see if you’ve been meeting quota, or at least outperforming everyone else on the team. Don’t just hit them, but keep accurate track for several months. You’ll come across as unprepared if all you can say is “I sell good”.
2. How Long Have You Been There: If you want a raise within 90 days, you may be jumping the gun. It takes time to prove yourself to your supervisors and a few months ain’t gonna cut it. Bare minimum—be there for six months before you go asking for a salary increase.
3. How’s The Turnover There: If everyone around you has been at the company for less than a year, it may tell you to just look elsewhere instead of negotiating. If they can run through people like that, it’s likely that you’ll get canned for asking for a raise.

Data Gathering

Don’t fly blind into this conversation. Take some time to understand the market you’re in and the hard data for your request.

There are a few things you can do to be fully prepared to make a formal argument for an increase.

Doing this research could even prompt you to negotiate, or not.

1. Average Income Data: Look at the income levels of your state and the area to compare how you’re stacking up. If you’re running far lower than average, it may be time to ask for an increase to keep up with cost of living.
2. Average Sales Salary Data: Sales reps all over input their data to places like Indeed and those sites compile it for us. We even put together an infographic that shows you the average sales reps salary by state****** (link). Compare with the average income.
3. Know Your Pay Structure: The first answer you may hear is, “sell more”. In many cases this is possible, but there are structures that will cap your income or make it next to impossible to increase your wage enough during a 40-60 hour work week.
4. Know What You Want: Figure out how much it is, or other things that you’d like to see happen. Find a range so you can budge a little bit during the talk, or find alternatives if the money isn’t there (e.g. turning a bonus into your salary to save on taxes).

“The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts.” – Howard Baker

How to Negotiate Salary: “In-the-Moment” Stage

Now that you’re studied and prepared to enter the arena, you’ll still need to know and understand some basic tactics that will make the biggest impression and (hopefully) get you that increase.

Tip One: Actually Do It

Seriously, it may sound appealing and even need to be done, but the thought of negotiating your salary may give you some reservations.

The truth is that most employees never initiate a conversation about pay, but the majority of companies say that they’re open to salary negotiations. Primary reasons for workers not wanting to ask are things like:

• Fear of getting fired (this is the number one reason)
• It’s not fun (this one shouldn’t bother sales folks as much)
• Lack of confidence (again, something most reps shouldn’t have an issue with)

So get in that office and make your requests known.

Tip Two: Do Your Pitch

Tell them what you want and why you want it (using the research you’ve done), but don’t be rude.

Explain and be honest about your desires and needs. Don’t be rude, take out the emotion and present it like you would any other pitch.

Just know that you are what you’re selling. Don’t bash the current pay structure, just state why it causes you to need a base salary increase and leave it at that.

Tip Three: Be the First Number In

You’ve seen the movie where someone writes a number on a little piece of paper and slides it across the desk, right?

Don’t do that, it might get you fired. But you should make sure the door is closed, or that no one else can hear you before you actually say the increase you want.

Be the first to give a number. It’ll help you set the bar and move down a bit from there.

Example: Let’s say you’re an SDR and get paid $30k base salary and a commission based on qualified appointments. Even the best reps (which you should be) only make about 30k in commission annually. If you live in a state where the average sales rep salary is $65,ooo/year, you want that extra 5k.

Ask for $7,000-$8,000 extra in salary and be comfortable taking $4,000-$5,000.

If it’s on your salary, you’ll probably pay less in taxes than you would if it was a bonus or commission.

When your boss speaks first, he/she could offer you $1,000/year and adding several thousand to that is a stretch; get your request in before he/she does.

Tip Four: Make Sure You Get Something

To be clear, you may not get a raise. It’s less likely that you’ll get the exact number you had in your head.

But that doesn’t mean you should leave without getting anything.

Many other things exist that can help you save money, or at least enjoy your job more. Here are a few.

1. Promotion/Job Change: You may not be able to make more as an SDR, but may be able to become a closer with more potential for commission. Or, you could take on a sales manager role and get that extra salary with a few more responsibilities.
2. Better Benefits: How about another week of paid vacation? This would be the equivalent of a week’s pay without having to work. Or, you could ask to remote work one day per week at home and save gas and have less stress.
3. Better WorkPlace: You could also ask for tools and other things that make the workplace better. There are tools that help manage and even collect leads to increase sales, ping pong tables for breaks, or even snacks or other team-building things to consider.
4. Better You: There are things that could make you a better salesperson. It could be training, books, or even clothing. Suits and ties (if you’re an in-person rep) can be expensive and maybe your company could offset some of those costs.

How to Negotiate Salary: After the Negotiation

Once you negotiate (and hopefully come out victorious), you’ll be under surveillance.

A thousand good things and met quotas before your conversation can be forgotten with one slip up after you get what you want. It may sound crazy, but you should full on consider yourself in a probationary period after you get your raise.

Most supervisors aren’t going to be angry, but anything that pops up on their radar about you will make them wonder if they made the right decision.

So, keep on doing everything you can to improve your performance, the performance of your team and the company as a whole.

In fact, it may help you to seek out new ways to help the company.

Figure out a couple of ways to save money, earn more, and prove that the pay increase was the right decision. It may be a good idea to have a few of these ideas before your negotiation and deliver them before and after the talk.

If you’re a B2B, you could suggest us!

How did you learn how to negotiate salary as a sales rep? Have you ever tried to negotiate your compensation?

What happens when you mix B2B marketing with a six-pack? The answer: A new go-to-market execution model that can help your business transform from product-centric to audience-centric.

On Thursday morning at the SiriusDecisions 2017 Summit, Marisa Kopec, VP, Innovation and Product Management, and Ross Graber, Senior Research Director, Marketing Operations Strategies, introduced the SiriusDecisions’ Go-to-Market Execution Model.

In many ways, this is the model that marketers have been waiting for. It’s the blueprint to operationalize how marketing, sales and product need to align to become audience-centric and grow the business — faster. You’ll see how the six-pack figures into this shortly.

We don’t need reminding that nearly every B2B organization faces the challenge of moving from a product-centric focus to an audience-centric focus. Organizations are structured based on product, and success metrics focus on revenue, market share and profitability. Changing this requires deprogramming your sales and product people (and maybe marketing too) and getting buy-in to shift to a new paradigm, according to Marisa,

Let’s see how we can get there.

Marisa began by introducing three signs your business is not audience-centric.

• You’re focused on yourself (your products/services) and not your buyer.
• You don’t know how your brand/solution compares to the competition as you’re vying for the buyer’s attention.
• Your messaging and marketing tactics don’t resonate with the needs and desires of your buyers.

All three indicate that you’re not making a connection with your buyers — a necessary connection to win their attention and their business. Ross shared that companies eventually reach an inflection point where they can grow without audience-centricity.

Now Marketers Have a Blueprint

The new Go-to-Market Execution Model is the result of two years of research and customer input. Its purpose is to help marketers operationalize audience-centricity. The key to success is having marketing, sales and product adopt the model. The model is built on eight activity-based stages:

1. Audience
2. Architect
3. Ideate
4. Plan
5. Design
6. Build
7. Activate
8. Measure

Marisa pointed out that the last four are the go-to-market engine. For the most part, these run fine; however, we’re putting the wrong fuel into them. If we put in product-centric fuel, we’ll get product-centric output. When we put in audience-centric fuel, real change happens.

Crack Open the Transformative Six-Pack

Since this is a complex model, Marisa and Ross emphasized that we don’t have to do everything at once. The model is designed to be modular, and we can start with a single component. To make it even easier, SiriusDecisions has identified six hotspots where we can focus to get the biggest impact. That’s our six-pack.

Can #1: Audience Framework

It all begins with knowing our audience. Although we’re in the B2B marketing world, buying is still a human cognitive decision process.

We assume we know our buyers, but we often don’t go deep enough into personas. In this stage, our presenters emphasized that we need to get marketing, sales and product in a room together and agree on the audience segments, where to target and which audiences to leave out. This should be done using a combination of qualitative and quantitative insights.

One promising new technique that’s emerging is audience sizing. This looks at the number of buying centers rather than the number of accounts.

Can #2: Buyer Needs

To put it bluntly, Ross said most companies suck at understanding the buyer needs. He went on to explain that we need to look at leads on three levels:

• Organizational
• Functional (department, etc.)
• Individual

Can #3: Go-to-Market Model

Marisa warned that product people start getting nervous when you talk about audiences rather than products. By creating an offering map based on the audience framework, the product people can begin to see where their products fit in, and they start to relax and buy in to the new process.

An offering map begins with audience needs and maps products to those needs—rather than vice versa. It will often uncover how products can be bundled to create new solutions that meet a need.

Can #4: Messaging

The messaging shifts completely when it’s based on audience insights. It can’t be all about our products and how they solve a problem. Blah, blah, blah… We have to include emotions to make a true connection with our audience. To do this, the templates and processes the messaging is built on must be audience-centric, with a clear understanding of the audience and personas.

Can #5: Campaign Hierarchy

Now it’s time to turn what we know into an action plan aligned to our audience. The offerings must follow from the audience. SiriusDecisions research shows that this results in higher response rates, greater engagement, and faster selling velocity.

The key is to structure campaigns around who we’re selling to.

Can #6: Measurement

It always comes down to measurement. In an audience poll, 70% of the respondents said they are still measuring success by product revenue. It’s time to go beyond this and measure results based on buying centers, buying groups and personas. Ross explained that we have to look for growth signals to show that we are reaching our targets and making progress. We also need to pay special attention to sales enablement to ensure that the model is being adopted by sales. Here are questions we need to answer:

• Who are we reaching?
• What portion of the buyer’s journey are we reaching?
• Are we applying budget to our audience-centric campaigns? Are our tactics being deployed?

If we can’t measure the progress in terms of the audience — down to the persona level — the business will not continue to fund our audience-centric model.

Take It One Step at a Time

This is just a quick peek at the new model. Marisa emphasized that this is not a rip-and-replace process. Bring components in one by one and change your processes over time. Then focus on optimizing them. Open one can to get started.

The tools already exist. Every stage is built around existing SiriusDecisions models and frameworks. What this new model does it integrate them in a way that’s never been done before. It’s the glue that holds all the existing pieces together, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

So, crack open a cold one and get started.

Most people think that with outbound sales, they can either have their cake or eat it but not both. This is because they think they only have two options when it comes to outbound sales. They can either send a general, untargeted email blast to hundreds or thousands of people (which scales but isn’t personal) or that they can painstakingly craft personal messages (which are personal but don’t scale) to each prospect.

In an ideal world, we would like our outbound campaigns to scale like an email blast while being personal like a handcrafted message. That might seem like a fantasy to most of you but what if I told you that it is possible to send personalized emails at scale? At Growbots, this is our secret sauce. And the key to pulling it off is a good targeting filter.

Is a targeting filter all I need?

A targeting filter is what allows you to send personalized messages at scale. Instead of finding details on a prospect so that you can send them a personal message, you start with a detail filled message. Using targeting filters, you can find prospects who match the details in the message. It means you only have to write one message instead of hundreds while keeping the content personal for each prospect. To find the right prospects to match your message, a targeting filter is essential.

Targeting filters work when they have the right kind of tools behind them. These include a good source of leads and a good emailing tool, preferably connected. On top of that, the more data points you have on your potential customers, the better. They will help you create the context of your campaigns.

Three examples of effective target filter use to inspire you:

1. We identified digital agencies as needing a targeting filter for technology when prospecting. Thanks to keywords targeting, we were able to run a campaign to every digital agency out there with a very specific message explaining the benefits of our technology filter. Here is the message that we created:
   That wasn’t the only example we have seen of putting a targeting filter to good use. Here is a couple more:
2. Once we acquired a couple of digital agencies as customers, they were then, in turn, able to reap the benefit from our technology targeting filter. They did this by targeting companies with outdated websites (not optimized for mobile) that needed to be updated. Just as we were able to use targeting filters to send the digital agencies a personalized message, they were able to reach thousands of customers with their own personalized message.
3. Another example of a good use of targeting filters is a customer of ours who has an e-commerce platform. To explain the benefits of his product, he created a comparison page with each of his competitors. Thanks to our technology targeting filter, he used the data he had collected to go after his competitor’s customers with a very relevant and powerful message.

A tool with targeting filters allows you to scale a personalized and relevant campaign

As you have read before, the easiest way to send a targeted campaign at scale is to apply the right targeting filters when prospecting. Then you can send a personal and relevant message to everyone who fits that criteria.

Having done a test on 1000 prospects, we found that a regular campaign got us a 4% positive response rate while a personal campaign got us a 10% positive response rate. Writing personal campaigns works, so all you need is a tool with good targeting filters.

When building a house, you can’t start with putting up walls and a roof – you must start with setting and building the foundation. When producing a movie, you can’t start with the conflict – you must start with character and plot development. When building a relationship, you can’t propose on the first date – you must start building trust and rapport.

Business is the same; you must start with the foundation. But, business is different in the sense that there’s no obvious place to start – no “standard” foundation. Before you start with the fun and sexy topics like technology and tactics, you have to start with the fundamental pieces.

One of those foundational pieces is sales and marketing alignment. Without it, you’re wasting money, time and energy.

We’re talking with some of the brightest leaders in sales and marketing to talk about the strategies and tactics they’re using to drive alignment and fuel growth. Here are some immediate and actionable pieces of advice from our speakers that you can use right now.

Deploy Empathy for Sales and Marketing to Understand Each Other

Gary Vaynerchuk CEO, Vaynermedia

“Sales and marketing orgs are going to hate each other because they have different objectives.

Sales people – one move from your marketing team can change everything for you. They can do 0 for 92, but one activation at a conference, one video they make for Facebook, one sponsorship, one thing fixes everything. They are literally Mike Tyson – one punch. That you have to respect. There’s nothing that you, a salesperson, can do, that will ever map to one excellent execution in marketing that has the same impact.

Next, marketers – I love that you can be highly successful and everyone knows how you are, but you’re not practical and you don’t get the full picture all the time. Your salespeople are grinding day-in and day-out, and are trying to clean up from the mistakes you’ve made or the misses you’ve had. They don’t have the luxury of your budget that has no quantifiable evidence to success. And you’ve got to be empathetic to your sales team because they are there and there’s no wiggle room.

Both of you desperately need to empathize with the other party. Those are the organizations that win. But that’s up to the head of marketing and the head of sales — to be aligned at the top and create the air-cover for their marketing and sales teams to be able to create a cohesive unit. And that’s what great alignment is.“

Sales Enablement is the Glue that Holds Sales and Marketing Together

Jamie Shanks CEO, Sales For Life

“They put together the people, process, and technology that can get the digital seller ready from a skills and a tech stack standpoint. You cannot be a digital seller without those two.”

Most Sales Enablement leaders are trainers, not divisional leaders. Where this fails is when a Sales Enablement leader is hired and they bring in the same playbooks that worked for them in the 20^th century. They are analogue coaches and trainers, so they try to throw workshops at the problem, buy tools and pray that people roll them out“

The Two Biggest Pitfalls that Companies Make that Cause Mis-alignment

Trish Bertuzzi President & Chief Strategist, The Bridge Group

“One of the biggest pitfalls of alignment is people thinking it happens fast. If your deal size is over $50K and you’re selling something complex or selling into the enterprise, you know what you’re sales cycle is. But just because you’re implemented a new strategy doesn’t mean you’ve shortened your sales cycle. What it does mean is you’re shortened your time to engagement with the right accounts. People confuse those two issues. They’ll give an Account Based Revenue strategy 3 months then say ‘we don’t have any revenue out of it.’ Well, your cycle was 3-9 months to begin with. What do you expect?!

You need to be willing to make that investment in time. It’s different, but you will get there.

The other pitfall is not having the right metrics in place. If marketing is still comped on number of leads generated or MQLs, that doesn’t make sense for this strategy. You have to think about what are the metrics by which we’re going to measure success, and how to we drive behavior to support those metrics.”

Get Sales and Marketing Working Together Against Revenue

Craig Rosenberg Chief Analyst & Co-founder, TOPO

“The big one is something we’ve all wanted for a long time, which is they have dividing lines for what they’re responsible for, but that’s not where they end the relationship. Frankly, that falls on marketing. Instead of isolating marketing to the job of creating MQLs, those two work together against revenue. It’s something we’ve always talked about but it doesn’t happen.

When they do that, they have common milestone, goals and a plan to get there.

There’s the soft stuff like communication and collaboration, but that doesn’t work unless they are both focused on the goal, the journey to get to the goal, and how they can help each other get there.”

Align Around the Status Quo to Find Leverage

Jill Konrath Best-Selling Author & Keynote Speaker

“Misalignment usually boils down to a root cause, and it’s the root cause that needs to be addressed. The root cause is the lack of a solid understanding of the buyer. I see it in marketing and in sales. Everybody is still too product and service focused; they’re driving towards their personal results, but they don’t know enough.

Even though, in recent years, people have been getting into buyer personas but they are very shallow, even the ones that I see in big companies. ‘Our buyer is a 32-year-old male into extreme sports etc. etc.’

Let’s get real. What does this buyer think about every day? What is this person’s role in the organization? What would make them want to change from the status quo? What is their status quo?

Virtually all marketers fail to tell their salespeople about the status quo. There’s usually three or four primary status quos. If you understand these, you’ll understand the leverage points”

How Technology Can Help or Hurt Your Organizational Alignment

Jon Miller CEO and Cofounder, Engagio

“Sales has always talked about accounts – at the end of the quarter, they talk about the accounts they’ve closed. Marketing has historically always talked about leads, and this is the fault of marketing automation platforms, which are lead-centric. So, you’ve got marketing working in a lead-based system and you’ve got sales working in an account-based system, which is inherently a mismatch that makes things hard.

It encourages marketing to be more focused on quantity – how many leads did I get? At the end of the day, sales care more about quality – am I engaging with the right kinds of people at the right accounts?

To make matters worse, both departments are generally working in different systems. Marketing has historically worked in their marketing automation platform, and 8 years ago, that wasn’t so bad because sales wasn’t sending their own emails at high volume. But in the last few years, we’ve had this emergence of sales automation tools. Now marketing is sending drip campaigns using their tools, and you also have sales sending drip campaigns using their tools. The problem is marketing doesn’t know who’s getting emailed by sales, and sales doesn’t know who’s getting emailed by marketing. That is not a cohesive customer experience, which is what really matters in the end.”

Get Marketing to Embrace Revenue Responsibility

Matt Heinz President, Heinz Marketing

“Traditionally, marketing has prioritized tactics and activities over outcomes. We have a sales team that is grinding it out at the end of the month and at the end of the quarter, while marketing is at the bar celebrating because they hit their re-tweet goal. That is not alignment!

You have to focus on metrics that you can buy a beer with.

The outcome of marketing should be sales development. If you start thinking about marketing as the sales development department we might be moving in the right direction. For alignment from the company standpoint, you have to step up and own metrics that you may not be immediately comfortable with (and certainly don’t have complete control over), but are the metrics that your CFO recognizes and your organization prioritizes. It would drive alignment of activity and metrics of culture inside of your marketing organization moving forward.

You move from an environment of more – more leads, traffic, clicks, retweets – and focus more on the business of pipeline. Focus on driving quality over quantity.”

Use Playbooks to Fill the Gaps in the Sales Process

David Brock CEO at Partners In EXCELLENCE, Sales Author

“You can think of our sales process as operating from a 50,000 foot level. The playbook takes the sales process down to the 10,000 or 15,000 foot level. If we do them right, they’re focused on a certain industry and the personas that are typically involved in the buying decisions. They take the general things that we focus on in the sales process and make then very specific in both the context and the content that is relevant to engaging customers effectively.

There are various approaches to playbook, but the best ones that I see mirror the sales process but then take it down to this very deep level. They start to move to the customer-specific issue and how we can engage the customers in those industries about those issues. Then, deeper than that, how do we engage each person in the buying process. We can start looking at the persona-specific issues.

The playbooks really provide guidelines to help us become increasingly relevant in our conversation and guide our customers through the buying process”

2017 Will Be The Year of Failure

Keenan CEO, A Sales Guy, Author

“If your SDRs sit with marketing, then they should absolutely be compensated on their ability to get the meeting. But marketing as a whole is more ambiguous on what they’re doing, so they have different metrics, but at the end of the day, if those metrics don’t get me the end revenue that I need, then they haven’t been successful. I like them to be more focused on the broader number that sales is also compensated on. If sales has a quota of $10M across 10 reps, then marketing damn straight better have $10M associated in their compensation as far as their bonuses.

Here’s the difference though – it should be part of their total target compensation, or on-target earnings. It shouldn’t be that marketing is compensated on, $10M for example, and if you hit this, you get a bonus on top, but if not, no worries, you get fully comped. Your totally target comp should include that. If you’re going to go hire a marketing executive for a quarter of a million dollars a year, but they only get 75% if they don’t hit their number. Compensation shouldn’t be additive – it should be the same as sales.”

Reverse Engineer Case Studies to Drive Alignment

John Barrows Owner, JBarrows Sales Training

“What can sales and marketing do to get better aligned? Just sit together!

But my favorite way of alignment sales and marketing – I don’t think sales reps get enough education just for business acumen purposes. Sales is finally starting to become professional. The problem is that we still teach on skills, techniques and processes but what we don’t reach on is business acumen. Helping a kid right out of school have a formal business conversation with an executive. Not your BANT questions.

The way I recommend doing this is running a call blitz. My favorite way to run a call blitz is reverse-engineer a case study. By the way, for all marketers, the only things that I’d focus on are case studies, case studies, case studies. These are stories – identify quantifiable results within those case studies. Don’t say, ‘after implementing our solution, they got significantly better results.’ Quantify it.

After that call blitz, sales and marketing sit down together and say ‘this worked and this didn’t.’ Do this just once a week, you’ll produce results, and any company can do it with no excuses”

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into aligning sales and marketing – that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve all heard the saying “time is money.” This is especially true for salespeople. Allotting time to one prospect over another could be the difference between closing a million dollar deal and having the door closed on you. Spending a certain amount of time on one group of activities could set a rep up for record week, while concentrating on something else might launch you down the path to a slump.

Time management is one of the most challenging disciplines for salespeople to master. Reps always have several important tasks competing for their attention at once. How do they prioritize and maximize their time?

Short of adding more hours to the day, a few solid time management hacks can help reps boost their productivity. Here are 13 of my favorites.

1. Eliminate administrative tasks

To maximize your selling time, look for administrative tasks you can automate. Saving a few minutes here and there will quickly add up -- and as an added benefit, you can direct more energy toward activities that are actually challenging, like giving demos or answering tough questions.

Here are a few examples:

• PandaDoc, which integrates with HubSpot, is a good tool for reps who send sales collateral and quotes. It automatically pulls in data from your CRM so you don't have to tediously copy and paste key details. You can send an error-free, personalized, professional-looking proposal in a few clicks.
• Route planning software can help you figure out the most efficient way to travel to your prospects' offices, meaning you'll never have to manually plan your route again.
• HubSpot Meetings lets buyer book open slots on your calendar instantly. Say goodbye to long email chains of "What about X time?" "Sorry, I'm busy .... What about Y?"
• Todoist, a to-do list app, uses AI to learn your personal productivity habits and schedule your overdue tasks accordingly. In other words, the app will figure out the optimal time for you to get everything done.

The best tools will depend on your industry, daily tasks, and specific role, so this is by no means a comprehensive list. The gist is: Automate as much of your non-selling activities as possible.

2. Be prepared to pivot

When I was in outside sales, I would organize my leads by location and always have the date of my last contact for each lead noted. If I got stood up for an appointment, I could quickly regroup and connect with other nearby prospects to secure a new meeting rather than drive back to the office or cool my heels in a coffee shop until the next appointment.

This tactic also applies to inside sales. Prospects cancel all the time, so salespeople should always be prepared to pivot into other profitable activities. The trick is to not shift gears on those activities. Say you’re prepared to have an exploratory call scheduled to run an hour and the prospects flakes on you. Since you’re already in the mindset of the exploratory call, spend that reclaimed hour prepping for other exploratory calls you have booked that week. Your mind is already focused on the exploratory process. Keep it there.

I’m sure some of you are saying to yourselves, that’s foolish advice -- you should use that time to prospect or make follow-up calls. But here’s the thing. Unless you have your leads at the ready and you’re fully prepped to prospect, the odds are you’ll waste time getting ready to make those calls.

From my point of view, prospecting is an activity that tends to be more effective when it is deliberate, planned, and scheduled. This brings us to the next point.

3. Stick with the task you're on

Multitasking is a myth. Studies have clearly shown that people cannot actually do two things at once; they’re really just quickly switching between tasks. And that switching dilutes focus and slows people down because their brains have to adjust to each task. Here are two great books about the subject if you’re interested: "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock and "Focus" by Daniel Goleman.

From a sales perspective, different tasks engage different mental muscles. For instance, giving demos requires a much different mindset and focus than pre-call prep or pipeline management. Sales reps can gain efficiency by grouping similar activities.

Take prospecting, for instance. Let’s say your organization advocates using voicemail and email as critical components to prospecting, and you’ve got two hours planned to make prospecting calls. One approach is to dial the phone, get the prospect’s voicemail, leave a message, write a follow-up email, send the email, document the activity in the CRM, set a new activity to try and reach the prospect again, and then move on to the next prospect on your call list and keep repeating this cycle for two hours.

This approach can chew up a ton of time because of all the activity switching. There are a lot of ways to streamline it. One way is to group activities:

• Figure out how many prospects you can reasonably call in the two hours if all you did was dial the phone and leave voicemail messages. Research that many prospects before your planned and scheduled prospecting time.
• When it’s time for your two hours of prospecting, pull up the list of researched prospects you want to call.
• Call each prospect and leave personalized voicemails based on your pre-call research.
• Log just the call activity in the CRM and quickly move onto the next prospect on the list. Repeat.
• Later in the day during scheduled administrative time, revisit the set of prospects you called to send out the follow-up emails and set the times you want to reach out again in the CRM.

This simple move to grouping activities will yield a much higher volume of calls, which improves the odds of actually talking to someone on the phone about what you’re selling. And that's what it's all about, right?

4. Swallow the frog

Every rep has at least one task in particular that they simply can’t stand. Prospecting, logging activity, writing follow-up emails, etc. I’ve got mine. I’m sure you’ve got yours.

The funny thing is we can all find plenty of ways to appear productive and avoid those important tasks we dread the most. But by overinvesting in one area to avoid doing work in another, time gets away from you. And behavior like that always catches up to you in the end.

The bottom line: Just do the thing you're uncomfortable with and get it over with. In fact, do it first if you can.

5. Keep going

When a rep experiences success or reaches an activity goal, they often take a break to pat themselves on the back. While I’m not against a quick coffee run, the best time to make a call or book an appointment is … right after you had a great call or booked an important appointment. So if you’ve allotted a certain amount of time to an activity -- say, two hours for prospecting -- don’t stop before the time is up even if you have some success right out of the gate.

Momentum is a powerful thing. Once you’ve got it, don’t squander it. You’ll have even more to pat yourself on the back for if you just keep going.

6. Structure your day around your buyer

According to experts, the best time to connect with prospects is in the afternoon, the very early morning, the evening, the late-mid early morning, or on weekends. I think that about covers it.

As you probably know, there is no perfect time to connect with your target buyers. It really depends on that particular buyer’s behavior and the way they allocate time to get their jobs done. If a salesperson is selling to contractors, calling at 10:00 a.m. isn’t going to work because they’re already busy on the job site. Calling on a restaurant with a thriving lunch and dinner business any time after noon is probably not going to yield a favorable conversation. Strive to structure your day around your target buyer’s schedule to avoid wasted time and unanswered calls.

7. Streamline repeatable tasks

I’m not a fan of sales scripts, but the fact remains that if your company targets a certain type of buyer, many of your prospects will be similar to each other. So instead of formulating a brand new list of questions each time you talk to a prospect, develop a core set you can work from and customize.

Developing a framework you use to research prospects is another smart idea. Look at previous deals you won and look for details that came in handy again and again. For instance, maybe you incorporated the knowledge you found on Crunchbase in seven of the last 10 deals you closed. Once you know which data sources are the most valuable, you can immediately go to those sources when researching new opportunities.

8. Have a concise value proposition

Another area where salespeople can waste time is during introductory conversations. At some point in every sales engagement, your prospect will ask some form of the question, “So what do you do, anyway?” If you have crisp, concise answers to the common questions you get asked every day, you'll have more time to discuss the things that really matter to your prospects and to gain an understanding of how you can help them. Having a clear, well-articulated value proposition at the ready lessens the possibility that you stumble through the explanation. And the more articulate you are with the buyer, the faster your sale will progress.

9. Create email templates

It's vastly inefficient to write a brand-new email every time you contact a prospect. While you should tailor each message to the individual and their situation, you'll save a huge amount of time if you start with a template rather than a blank slate.

Look through your "Sent" folder to find the emails you send repeatedly. That doesn't just include outreach emails -- you should also make templates for following up, scheduling meetings, recapping calls, and so forth.

10. Reduce distractions

It can be hard to stay focused when your favorite time-wasting site is just a click away. To ensure you stay focused, ruthlessly get rid of every distraction. If you don't use a website for your job, block it using the Chrome extension Blocksite or by following these instructions for restricting sites on Safari.

Reps should also stow their cell phones out of sight. It's all too tempting to check social media or your texts if you can see or hear notifications come up.

11. Create your to-do list the night before

Instead of wasting your productive mornings organizing your day, do it right before you leave for the night. That way, you can get right to work when you come into the office the next day. Save tasks like these for when your burned out in the evenings, and make the most of the time you have.

12. Chunk your time

The Pomodoro Technique encourages people to work in 25-minute chunks to maximize productivity. There are similar techniques that share the benefits of working in 90-minute increments. Chunking your time allows you to find a flow and squeeze the most productivity out of every day.

13. Take breaks

The Pomodoro Technique I mentioned above also recommends taking a five-minute break between each time chunk. Get up, move around, go for a quick walk, or grab some water -- but give your brain a chance to rest, recoup, and stay fresh.

These are just a few tricks I have found help sales reps gain more control over their time and their results. What clever hacks have you come up with to save time and be more productive on the sales floor and out in the field? Share your ideas in the comments.

There is a big debate out there about inbound and outbound sales. Some companies swear by their inbound strategies while others fight for their outbound strategies. But even the diehards in both camps are coming around to a new philosophy. Called allbound by some, it involves executing both inbound and outbound sales strategies simultaneously to draw in even more customers than either could on their own.

Allbound is not just a fringe idea. Hubspot, the great champion of inbound and coiners of the term “inbound” sales now also does outbound. And Growbots, a company built on making outbound sales work also does inbound. If both of these companies are doing it, it is pretty clear that you should make inbound and outbound sales work together.

Of course, it is not enough to simply run both an inbound and outbound sales strategy in parallel without connecting the two of them.

Why bother connecting inbound and outbound sales?

Because while both are independent sources of leads, they can compliment each other. Not only can they both bring in a separate stream of high-quality leads but your inbound strategy will enhance your outbound strategy, causing it to perform better.

There are a few different ways that inbound and outbound sales link up to each other.

• Targeting documents like ideal customer profiles, buyer personas, and job stories

  While some of these, like buyer personas, have been mostly linked to inbound in the past, you will find that all of them can be used for targeting for both your inbound and outbound sales strategies. This means that you only have to create one set of targeting documents that you then apply to all of your lead generation channels.

• Blog posts

  The blog posts that you use to generate inbound leads can be attached to you outbound campaign. This way you don’t just ask for something from your prospects, you give them value by providing them with useful information.

• Landing pages

  Instead of just linking your outbound campaign back to your home page, set up specific landing pages for each of the buyer personas you target. Since you know a lot about the kinds of people you are targeting, tailor your landing pages to appeal to each persona. By doing this you can increase your conversion rate.

  Important: Landing pages should be a natural extension of your emails. When creating the landing page, think about what you told your prospect in the email and what they can expect by clicking through to the landing page.

• Retargeting

  The success of outbound sales relies heavily on timing. It doesn’t matter how good your pitch is, if your prospect is too busy to deal with what you are proposing, they won’t respond to you. This doesn’t mean that you should give up on them or that they wouldn’t be receptive to what you have to say.

• To keep you at the top of your prospect’s mind, attach a tracking code to your landing page. You should then run retargeting ads so that they are eventually brought back to your website.

• Lead nurturing

  Like we said above, timing is important with outbound sales. Sometimes you have leads who don’t move forward in the buying process for whatever reason. To remind them of the value you provide, initiate a lead nurturing program using inbound blog posts. This has the potential to bring a number of customers back to you who you would have lost otherwise. Not only that but nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

Inbound and outbound sales serve to strengthen each other

A number of the materials and techniques you use for inbound will strengthen your outbound campaigns. It is easier to set up and start seeing predictable results from an outbound campaign but once that is set up, consider adopting an inbound strategy to strengthen your outbound campaign. If you are still having trouble making outbound predictable, call us first before starting anything else and we will help you get the results you are looking for.

Email marketers are busy people.

First, they have to develop customer journeys.

Then, they have to create emails for each step throughout the journey.

Finally, they have to design, write and test each email.

If this doesn’t seem like much, they also have to analyze the results and improve each of their multiple campaigns.

In this context, an email marketer could use some help.

Here’s where Google Chrome and its large extensions marketplace come to the rescue.

Since there are thousands of Google Chrome extensions, it’s easy to get lost.

That’s why we’ve gathered thirty-eight of the best Chrome extensions to use with your email marketing campaigns.

Designing

Conceptboard

Designing an email newsletter isn’t always easy. There can be many parties involved, including designers, developers, and other marketers. Multiply this by the different campaigns you may have, and this process can get ugly.

Conceptboard is a collaborative, whiteboard-based project management tool that allows you to bring all the stakeholders involved in the development of your newsletter in one place. You can brainstorm and collaborate in real-time just like if you were in the same room as well as start a video conference right on the board itself.

ColorZilla

Have you ever tried to design a newsletter and found you didn’t know what hex color is the one your company uses? With Colorzilla you won’t have this problem anymore as it allows you to get the color of any pixel on the page. You can also pick a color from a palette and get the CSS code for each color.

PicMonkey

Have you ever been creating one of your newsletters when all of a sudden you realized one of the images looks bad? You could send it over to your design team (if you are lucky enough to have one), but it can take you some time to get the image back, and you may not have the luxury of waiting.
PicMonkey is a simple image editor that allows you to make any changes you want to your images without having to leave your browser or use Photoshop.

What Font

Fonts give any email newsletter personality and a unique voice. Sometimes, however, it can be hard to pick the right font for your email campaigns.
What Font can help you to solve this problem by identifying any font you find on a page. Just click on the button on your browser, and you will see the font the page you are browsing uses.

Writing

Auto Text Expander

When you send different emails with similar content, it can get tiring to repeat the same messages over and over. Auto Text Expander is a simple plugin that allows you to define a shortcut tied to a particular set of words, so once you write the former the extension “translates” it to the latter.
For example, if you wanted to save some time to write the phrase “let me know your thoughts,” you could create a shortcut called “lkt” or “lemme.” Once you wrote that shortcut in your email, the extension would immediately write the phrase for you, helping you save time in the process.

Corporate Ipsum

The white page can be challenging when you have to write a newsletter from scratch. Using a “Corporate Ipsum” can help you overcome this problem by adding fun dummy text on your pages. Simply click on the button, and a string of incoherent corporate-looking text will show up which you can copy and paste onto your email newsletter.

Evernote Web Clipper

Do you want to bookmark an article you like? Do you feel like capturing a page? Then Evernote’s Web Clipper extension is what you need. Once you are on the page you want to save, click on Evernote’s button, give your clipping a name, select among the five capture options you have, and save it. Then, you can access your clipping from your Evernote app.

Giphy

GIFs add a fun and quirky touch to any email. If you want to surprise your subscribers with a GIF, Giphy can help you add one easily with a few clicks.

GoodBits

Content curation is an easy and reliable way to engage with your list. The problem is, it takes time. Searching, selecting, and adding each content piece to your list can make curation harder than it seems. Here’s where GoodBits comes into rescue. With GoodBits’ extension, you can collect content as you go which you can later use on your newsletter. You save time while delivering value to your audience.

Gorgias

If you send emails regularly enough, you often end up writing the same kind of email over and over again. Instead of having to waste that much time, you could simply create a template which you can then copy and paste and adapt it for each occasion. Gorgias is an extension that allows you to create shortcuts (similar to what Auto Text Expander does) and templates. You can also personalize each template with the help of variables.

Grammarly

If there’s one thing no one can accept from any written piece is grammatical mistakes. Instead of having to waste a lot of time reading every word to check for mistakes, Grammarly finds and highlights every grammatical mistake as you write, and suggests improvements which are automatically added if you accept them.

Headlinr

Creating an attractive subject line is an important step to make sure your emails don’t get ignored. You could follow Upworthy’s advice and write 25 subject lines, but let’s be honest, you don’t have that much time. Headlinr is a handy extension that suggests many headline variations based on a given keyword. It also gives you a swipe file of successful headlines for you to copy and use on your own subject lines.

Papier

If you write regularly you know how hard it can sometimes be to sit down and just write. Not only you can get blocked, you can also get distracted. Two clicks and you are watching YouTube videos of cats (I know someone who does this often). Papier solves this problem by giving you a distraction-free writing environment where to put your thoughts on paper. Once you install it, you only need to click on its button and you will have Papier’s editor ready to write.

Analytics

Bitly

If you have ever tried to share a link with your subscribers you know how bad a long URL can look. Bitly can help you shorten your URLs and make them look cleaner in just a few simple clicks.

Cyfe

If there’s one thing few people like about data analysis is having to multi-task among different providers the data you need. You can waste so much time that sometimes you feel it’s not even worth checking for that data. If that’s a problem you commonly have, then you need to install Cyfe. Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that helps you monitor and analyze data scattered across all your online services, including Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter and more.

Google Analytics URL Builder

Every time I create a new email campaign I take the time to add well-structured UTM parameters to my links so I can track the performance of my emails. The only annoying thing is having to go to the page where Google helps you create those URLs. I always seem to forget the URL.

The Google Analytics URL Builder is the perfect extension for people like me. Once you install it, you only need to click on the button and you will be able to add the parameters to your URL.

Litmus

A common problem among email marketers is device and browser performance. People tend to check their emails with different devices which vary greatly in size, while the browser used can complicate things even further. Litmus is a handy tool that can help you see how your emails would look in a large variety of phones and browsers all in one place.

Marketing

BuzzStream Buzzmarker

Outreaching is one of the most powerful marketing tactics to get anything promoted. Taking the time to find the prospects, writing an email, and following up, however, is nothing but hard. BuzzStream is an outreach tool that allows you research influencers, manage your relationships, and conduct outreach. Their Buzzmarker extension helps you inspect each website and influencer you find to see whether they are relevant, make notes, and discover their contact information segment them based on without having to leave the site you’re on.

Find That Lead

Finding the email address of a prospect or influencer on LinkedIn can be a lengthy process. You first need to connect with them, which can take a few hours to a few weeks, if you ever get accepted. Then, in most cases, you can get their email address, although in many cases people share their personal email and not their professional one. Find That Lead is an extension that helps you guess the email address of any Linkedin’s user. Once you are in the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, you add their name, position, and company’s website, and Find That Lead will guess it for you.

Landing Page Checklist

Landing pages are complex creatures. Before publishing one, you need to make sure you have the right title, good copy all around the page, and a conversion-focused design. The Landing Page Checklist extension, developed by Unbounce, gives you a simple checklist with everything your landing page needs to have to be optimized for conversions.

List Goal

Sometimes we like to achieve a goal yet we fail to take any action that leads us to the desired result. Some accountability can be helpful to overcome this problem. List Goal is an extension that nudges you to work specifically on growing your email list. After you install the extension, you choose how big you want your list to be. Then, every time you open a new tab you’ll get a small nudge to take the necessary steps to get that result. Finally, every Friday you’ll get an accountability email where you will see the progress from the previous week and give you one action item for the next 7 days.

Productivity

Boards for Trello

Trello is one of the most popular project-management tools because of its simplicity and ease of use. Sometimes when you are working on an important email marketing campaign with your team you get a lot of messages in a short period of time, which means you need to go back and forth between your Trello browser tab and your email marketing provider. Boards for Trello allows you to use Trello without having to keep a separate tab just to use it.

iMacros

How many times do you repeat the same task over and over and lose valuable time? If you are like most people, you probably do that a lot.
iMacros is an extension designed to automate the most repetitious tasks on the web, like remembering passwords or filling forms. Every time you find yourself repeating the same task, just record it in iMacros. The next time you need to do it, run the entire macro and everything will be done for you.

Strict Workflow

These days it’s easy to get distracted. Facebook, YouTube or your favorite news site are only a click away. Strict Workflow is an extension that takes the famous Pomodoro technique into action. First, you need to define what sites you want to block. Then, once you start a Pomodoro set, those sites will be blocked, giving you a productive nudge to help you work.

Toggl

Whenever you work on an email marketing campaign, you need to make sure you take the right amount of time to focus on each task. The best way to do so is to track the time for each task you have to implement so you can the measure the results and improve your processes. Toggl is a time tracking tool with a handy extension that allows you to quickly start measuring the time you spend on each task. You can also measure the time of the rest of your team and see what bottlenecks could be wasting your team’s time.

Wunderlist for Chrome

Developing an email marketing campaign takes a lot of steps, some of which may end up confusing you and your team. Having a clear set of to-do’s for each your members allows you to streamline your processes and improve your efficiency. Wunderlist is one of the most popular to-do apps in the market that also helps you track your tasks. With Wunderlist’s extension, you can quickly add a new to-do to each of your campaigns by opening a new tab.

Gmail Users

BombBomb

When sending an outreach email to an important person, sometimes it can be hard to call on their attention. You can be funny, intriguing, or simply dead honest on what you want. One of the least expected ways, however, is using video in their emails. The reason few people use video is due to the fact it’s hard to record a video, upload it, and then attach it.

BombBomb is an extension that allows you to do all those three things without a need to overcomplicate the process. You can also track opens and video plays as well as schedule follow-ups.

Hunter

One of the most time-consuming activities every outreach campaign has it’s finding the prospect’s email address. It’s generally a hit-or-miss process, where you try to guess an address, you send it, and then you cross your fingers to see whether you get an error email or not.
Hunter is a tool that guesses the most likely email address structure based on the one most people use in a given domain. You can also add the prospect’s name and you can let Hunter guess the email address for you.

Mailtrack

How many times have you sent an important email and didn’t get any response back? The uncertainty can be nerve-wracking. If you send another email too soon, you may annoy the recipient, but if you don’t send any, they may forget. What can you do? Mailtrack allows you to see when a recipient opens an email and read it. You can also see how long ago and how many times they did so.

Rapportive

How many times have you sent an email without knowing who exactly you are sending it to? Many times not knowing who’s the recipient can lower the chances of connecting with that person and ruin your chances to get what you want. Rapportive can help you by adding the recipient’s Linkedin profile right in your Gmail inbox, so you can see all their details.

Right Inbox

Time differences can make or break your email’s performance. If you are on the East coast and you send an email early in the morning to a prospect that’s in the West, he may end up ignoring it. You could wait a few hours until it’s 9 am on the West Coast, but many times you have too many things to remember that. Right Inbox is an extension that allows you to schedule your emails for later as well as send recurring emails and set reminders to follow up. Side note: You can also use Campaign Monitor’s send time optimization feature which allows you to send your email at the optimal time for each subscriber, or time zone sending feature which enables you to send your email campaign at an exact time in each unique time zone so you can make sure your breakfast email hits inboxes at 8 am around the world.

Streak

If you need to do any sales outreaching, you know how important CRMs are to help you organize your workload. Streak is one of the most popular CRMs in the market, and its Chrome extension can help you save a lot of time managing your campaigns. Instead of having to switch back and forth between your Streak and your Gmail tab, you can manage each campaign as you work on it. For example, you can see who’s on your highest priority stage and then work on those people. You can see their information so you can create a relevant email that gets opened and read. Finally, you can track opens so you know when to follow up.

Virtu Email Encryption

Every time I send an email that has an important attachment with personal information, I’m scared that someone may hack either my account or the recipient’s one, and steal all my information.

Virtu is an extension that encrypts your emails so you don’t fear any longer. Once you active Virtu, your emails and any file attachments can only be decrypted by the people you authorize. Virtu can help you meet HIPAA, CJIS, CFPB, or other compliance regulations as well as help you ensure that third party providers can never access your sensitive content.

WiseStamp

Email signatures are an easy way to showcase important information without having to explicitly mention it. Most Gmail signatures aren’t very good; they don’t allow you to do any CSS editing.

WiseStamp can help you link to all your social networks and profiles, promote the items you sell or your company’s blog, legal disclaimers, and of course, show your Company logo.

Miscellaneous

One Click Extensions Manager

This article has shown you many extensions for you to install. If you install most of them, your browser will look like the house of a hoarder. You don’t want that to happen. Ironically, one extension that can help you manage your extensions is One Click Extensions Manager, which allows you to activate and deactivate all your extensions from one single place. That way, you will be able to have many extensions and only use them when you have to.

OneTab

How many times have you been working on an email campaign when all of a sudden you found yourself with a dozen different tabs, all competing for your attention? If you are anything like me, it happens more often than you wish.

OneTab can help you take all your tabs and put them under one unique tab. Once you click on one of the tabs within the unique tab, it will re-open.

Pushbullet

Communication, collaboration, sharing. There are many words to describe what Pushbullet does, yet none of them work. Pushbullet is an all-around extension that allows you to do several things:

• Reply to messages from your main messaging apps, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Kik.
• Receive and answer SMS messages.
• Copy links from one device (like your phone) and send it to another device (like your computer browser).
• Send files to your friends.

To paraphrase CNET, “Pushbullet is the app you never knew you needed”.

Zapier

Have you ever been working on a campaign when you found yourself repeating the same task over and over? You could get a little automation help.

Zapier is a tool that allows you to connect your favorite apps and automates tasks between them. Their Chrome extension can help you create those automated workflows directly from your browser.

You could, for example, connect your Campaign Monitor account with Google Sheets, so every time you got a new subscriber Zapier would add each one to a given sheet.

Wrap up

We’ve just shown you the best Chrome extensions you need to use for your email campaigns.You don’t need to use all of them. Simply pick a few of your favorites and add more as you need them.

“What is your mantra for success in business?” Ask this question to any email marketer and promptly comes the reply,

The work of an email marketer is not a simple one. Endless time and efforts are invested in strategizing an email marketing campaign.

 

As per 2016 Email Marketing Industry Census by eConsultancy, a major chunk of email marketers spent anywhere between 2-8 hours in designing & formulating content and only 2 hours for strategizing and researching the data.

Moreover, email marketers list the following as the challenges that they regularly face:

• My client needed this template yesterday – Last moment requirements
• My ESP has good templates but I need more flexibility – Easy Editability
• Can you please add this section in the email going in next one hour? – Urgency
• Would the template work in Outlook & Gmail? – Template render-ability
• Find Eugene the email developer for adding a new section in the template – Dependency
• Can this template be reused again? – Reusability
• How would it cost me? – Costing
• Dan the email designer never follows the branding guidelines – Design inconsistency

With the email marketing domain aggressively shifting to automation for lead generation, nurturing and converting leads in their sales funnel, the attention of an email marketer should focus on strategizing their approach. This means investing less time in tackling the above-stated challenges and more on testing different marketing strategies. Desperate times call for desperate measures. In such times, email marketers find it wise to invest in a modular email template.

Difference between a Master Email Template and a Modular Email Template

Master email template is a skeleton key that can be used to create any type of email from a set of different content blocks within the specific ESP editor. This is particularly useful in scenarios wherein the branding is consistent and so header and footer sections shall remain constant.

Modular email template is a subset of a master email template, but is useful for:

1. Email marketing agencies to send similar looking emails but for different brands.
2. Brands with different sub-brands that have different branding guidelines.
3. A great help on transactional emails (especially invoice, cart, abandoned cart, reminder, etc.)
4. Automated emails like Welcome series, Social following, Birthday emails, etc.

Steps to create Modular Email Templates

1. Understand the needs: Identify the type of email that shall be sent using this template and also the type of content that shall go in the email. Normally, if you are associated well with the brand, it’s easy to judge what sort of modules you will need to create different type of emails.
2. Select common sections: Based on the type of email to be sent, identify common sections that shall be consistent.
   In a welcome email– a header featuring the brand logo, social plugins, view online link, etc., a body with a hero image, a CAN-Spam compliant footer.
   In an email newsletter– a header with a brand logo, view online link, an email body with one or two columns, a CTA button, unsubscribe link.
   In a transactional email– a header with brand logo, email body with rows of text with space for the dynamic block that is replaced with the image of the products.
3. Visualize the template: Once the common sections are finalized, it’s time to get the template designed. For agencies dabbling with different brands, the final template may be plain looking, albeit any colors, owing to different branding guidelines.
4. Code it and Test: This is the final step in the template production process. Once the template design is done, get it coded. Then test it for rendering, and you are done.

Even though the above steps are similar to the ones followed for any generic email template, the point of separation is in the selection of the common sections.

Wrapping Up

Just like a master email template, a modular email template only needs a significant time in the conceptualization stage and shall prove very helpful in the later stages.

LinkedIn recently announced they were launching a new ad type, Lead Gen Forms, allowing advertisers to directly collect lead information for Sponsored Content campaigns. Similar to Facebook lead ads, LinkedIn’s lead gen forms will automatically populate a user’s profile information when they decide to download a piece of content. This is perfect for users who are in a rush and don’t want to fill out a form.

LinkedIn has stated that 80% of member engagement with Sponsored Content campaigns actually happens on smartphones, so generating leads with a form that is automatically populated, is ideal for advertisers to improve conversion rates!

I run digital lead gen campaigns targeted at B2B audiences and have recently been testing LinkedIn’s lead gen forms in my Sponsored Content campaigns. I wanted to share what I think is working so far and what isn’t working – at least not yet.

What’s Working

We have all heard that “content is king.” And for LinkedIn ads it truly is. I have been testing LinkedIn lead gen forms for a few weeks now and have received very efficient leads within our ideal customer profile downloading our content. The audience I am bidding on is very specific to the piece of content I am sponsoring, and I am not being cheap with my bids. My main tip for making LinkedIn lead gen forms is to build A LOT of different campaigns where you are sponsoring very specific content to a very specific audience.

With a cost-per-click (CPC) pricing model, costs can reach upwards of $10 per click. I highly recommend not adding what I consider “fluff” to your audience target just to reach LinkedIn’s recommended audience size of 300,000+ members.

My recommendation is to limit your audience size, based on personal experience. I increased the size of one of my audience profiles to ensure I hit the 300,000 member mark and I blew through my budget before 9am. Remember that LinkedIn doesn’t have budget pacing or time of day bid adjustments, so make sure the audience you’re willing to spend money on is, in fact, your target audience.

Another tip is to make sure you add URL parameters to the “Thank You” part of the lead gen form, where the user has the option to visit your website. Keep in mind the user does not have to take that option (which I address in the “Not Working – Yet” section below), but if they do this will ensure you capture attribution as well as any incremental conversions, such as phone calls, in your analytics tool.

What’s Not Working – Yet

The integrations. Specifically in relation to uploading lead management and contacts directly into my marketing automation system. Granted we use Marketo, and LinkedIn has not yet built an integration with Marketo. But every single morning I am manually entering individual leads into Marketo so it syncs within my CRM tool, where I can then manage sales activity and campaign membership. This solution is not sustainable long term, especially as I receive a decent volume of leads (that’s the silver lining to this manual process). But Marketo is on LinkedIn’s short list of integrations slated to become available, so I am holding out for now and will continue to scale and run lead gen ads while manually uploading leads.

The retargeting. Users never need to hit your site to receive the content download, especially if you send the user a .pdf download, so standard site retargeting may not be available. However, depending on the field data you decide to collect, you can do some first party audience targeting and retargeting with phone numbers and email addresses. This will give marketers a chance to push additional content and ads toward these users through your display vendor or other platforms, such as Facebook and Google Display Network, where you can build unique audiences from your first party data.

Regardless of the downfalls, I highly recommend testing out LinkedIn lead gen forms, especially if you have great content available to promote. You not only get to be specific with your audiences, but it’s also a great way to capture leads on mobile devices.

I’ve read and heard (from a well-known industry analyst firm) that best-in-class companies close 30% of sales qualified leads while average companies close 20%.

Those results factor in lead leakage of between 52% to 86% of the marketing qualified leads put into the top of the funnel.

If you do the math, this tells us that sales reps are expected to work 1000 marketing qualified leads down to 14 to 48 sales qualified leads and close 20% or 30% of those leads respectively; and end up with 3 to 14 deals. Not very efficient, right?

And, guess what the reality is? Sales isn’t qualifying down from 1000 marketing qualified leads to 14 sales qualified leads. They don’t have the time or interest (or the DNA).

So, what happens? Best case a stack of leads (virtual or otherwise) is rifled through, a few leads are cherry-picked out – and other leads are left to go into the black hole frequently called CRM.

Imagine Spending $208,350 on Marketing Leads That Are Trashed Immediately   

One of the biggest software companies in the world has a division that spends over $200,000 per year on leads that sales refuses to follow-up on.

Why don’t they follow-up? Because a few years ago the sales group asked us (PointClear) to validate those so-called leads and it turned out that only 1.8% were even qualified companies, let alone what could be termed sales qualified leads.

Less than 2% of the total were merely qualified companies, mind you. None were actually leads.

What chance do you think there is that sales will work 9,000 “leads” when they know just 162 of them are even qualified companies? The sales close rate on these leads is zero percent. What a waste.

Imagine That You Could Deliver 100% Sales Qualified Leads to Sales

This is not the place to explain how you can deliver 100% sales qualified leads to sales (but I can certainly tell you if you want to know, give me a call at 678-533-2722 or shoot me an email, dan.mcdade@pointclear.com). This is the place to show how amazingly low the close rate can be to break-even on converting marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads via lead qualificant and nurturing, and what the return is on good sales lead management:

Assumptions:

Margin is 60% (probably conservative for software and services)

Cost per sales qualified lead is $1,250

Assume that the deal size is either an on premise license sale or a SaaS model with net present values calculated – for here we just want to make the match easy.

For a $300,000 deal ($180,000 in margin) the close rate would need to be .694% (not even 1%)

For a $100,000 deal ($60,000 in margin) the close rate would need to be 2.08%

For a $10,000 deal ($6,000 in margin) the close rate would need to be 20.8%

If the average company could, in fact, close 20% of sales qualified leads the ROMI would be $28.80 for every $1 invested (again based on 60% gross margin).

I find that close rates are generally over-stated. When I ask sales executives what percent of sales qualified leads they can close their answer is generally in the 60% to 80% range. What they mean is that they will close 60% to 80% of what they thought they would close. Close rates probably can be a lot lower than most people think. Not that they should be. But they can be.

Finally, no sales executive wants to admit that they are closing one-out-of-10 opportunities (as an example). So, they don’t provide visibility into the pipeline until late in the game which causes inaccurate forecasts and other pain.

Recap

What is a healthy close rate for your solution(s) and/or service(s)?

How much money could you save and how much more revenue could you generate if you understood the optimal close rate and provided sales with sales qualified leads?

Did you know that leads cost more than you think, but probably a lot less than you are currently paying?

Contact me at dan.mcdade@pointclear.com for help evaluating your situation.

 

Your product could be a great fit for your prospect. It's within their budget, you've offered them the perfect discount -- it should be a slam dunk. But unless they feel a sense of urgency, your prospect won't buy.

So, you should create some. Right?

Wrong. Sales strategist David Weinhaus, who works with HubSpot partner agencies, has a strong view on “creating” urgency.

Instead of manufacturing a cause to act -- which isn’t helpful to your prospect and will ultimately backfire -- either uncover an existing reason they’re not aware of or back off.

Ask the right questions -- like the ones below -- and get your prospect to realize they’re unhappy or dissatisfied. And if your questions don’t lead them to those conclusions, accept they’re still in education mode and let your marketing department nurture them until the time is right.

How to Create Urgency in Sales

Ask about their business

1) "How big is the company today in terms of annual revenue, approximate customer number, and employee headcount?"

This question helps you qualify them and start a discussion about how big they’d like to be in the future (and what’s currently standing in the way).

2) "Is the business struggling, in a steady state, or in growth mode? Is [company] growing faster than the industry average?"

Remind the buyer of their overarching business goals. This is a good tie-in to how your product would play into their strategy.

3) "Many of the people in your role I talk to don’t know [surprising fact]. Did you?"

I like the Challenger Sale method of teaching your prospect something new -- not only will your credibility and authority go up, but you’ll naturally uncover urgency. The buyer will want to act on this information ASAP.

Ask about their pain points

4) "What is the problem you’re looking to solve?"

The buyer might be focused on a different pain point than you. Use this question to figure out if they’re on the right track. Sometimes, prospects try to address the symptoms rather than the cause by mistake.

5) "Why is now the right time to solve it?"

Asking why now is the right to solve this issue gives you an early glimpse into how much urgency your prospect already has. If it's not yet an urgent problem, you might lead them to realizing it is.

6) "Who or what is this problem affecting most?"

It might be their boss, themselves, or the company, but asking this question allows them to consider the human or business costs of not addressing this issue quickly. 

7) "Is the problem clearly defined?"

Learn how much time they’ve spent investigating the issue. Hint: The more clearly they’ve isolated it, the more invested they probably are in fixing it.

8) "Have you had this problem before?"

Figure out just how persistent your prospect’s pain point is.

9) "Is the problem easy or hard to address?"

Chances are, the prospect will say it’s the latter. If it was easy to solve, they would have tackled it by now.

10) "How does this problem affect the revenue, profitability, culture, or product cycle of the business?"

This question highlights the larger implications of what’s going wrong.

11) "Does this problem affect a lot of people?"

Get your prospect thinking about how widespread the effects are.

12) "Are you tasked with solving this problem as part of your regular job, or is this a special assignment?"

If your prospect says, “It’s part of my job,” then make sure you tie their overall performance to fixing this issue. If they say, “It’s a special assignment,” then there’s already genuine urgency: They need to identify an answer before a certain date.

Ask about the consequences of not buying

13) "What happens if you address the problem? What happens if you don’t?"

This naturally leads the buyer to compare life with your product and life without. The second is usually much less appealing.

14) "When do you need to start seeing the results of implementing the solution?"

The prospect would probably love to see results right away. Their answer will help them realize why time is of the essence.

15) "What is the one thing that, if we could help solve it quickly, would have the most meaningful impact on the company?"

Once you’ve pinpointed a major opportunity to help, urgency will spring up naturally.

16) "How would solving this problem affect you personally?"

Knowing the buyer’s individual motivators can make or break the deal.

17) "How does this affect your boss?"

When the prospect’s boss is happy, they’re happy. Connect the dots between your solution and their supervisor.

18) "What happens if you keep doing what you are doing?"

It’s far easier to stick with the status quo than make a change, even if the long-term ramifications could sink the prospect’s business. With this question, you’ll get them to come to terms with the dangers of ignoring the issue.

Ask about how the problem affects them 

19) "How can we make you look like a star?"

This question turns you into the prospect’s partner, instead of just their rep. It also helps you pinpoint how your product can help them look great at the office.

20) "What do you need to do/what objectives must you reach to get a promotion?"

Along similar lines as #17, this question reveals why the buyer is personally invested in finding a solution.

21) "How does this problem affect you on a day-to-day basis?"

Most professionals put up with annoying or deleterious pain points. As soon as you show the prospect there’s a better, easier way, they’ll be more eager to buy.

22) "How does this problem affect [department]?"

Get them to zoom out and visualize the impact on the wider team.

23) "If you weren’t experiencing this pain anymore, which projects/priorities could you focus on?"

This question makes the buyer envision a world where they have time, energy, and resources for the tasks or initiatives they’re interested in.

24) "What’s the most frustrating aspect of this problem?"

Once you learn what’s driving your prospect up the wall, you can position your product accordingly.

25) "What [projects, campaigns, initiatives] are you currently working on? How does [challenge] impact your plans?"

This is another way of learning how the pain point is interfering with or obstructing their day-to-day work.

26) "What problems come up most frequently at executive meetings?"

If the CEO cares about an issue, your prospect will too.

27) "Which problems keep you at the office late?"

Figure out which issues the buyer doesn’t have an easy answer to.

28) "Which themes are coming up again and again on [Slack, Hipchat, your knowledge base/wiki]?"

While not every company uses internal knowledge base or a wiki, asking those who do about the most common themes can help you pinpoint the most exciting, visible, or challenging things they’re facing.

Ask about the competition

29) "Is your industry getting more competitive?"

Most industries are. Capitalize on your prospect’s awareness that they need to act to maintain their edge -- or gain one in the first place.

30) "Are you worried about [specific competitor]?"

Figure out who’s nipping at your prospect’s heels, then show them how your solution will widen the gap in their favor.

31) "Do you ever get the sense that [people in prospect’s department] are wasting [time, effort, leads, budget]?"

Mitigating (or even eliminating) the inefficiencies in the buyer’s department would be a huge win. Open their eyes to the possibility of a fix.

32) "Have you ever lost a major customer unexpectedly?"

Whether the answer is yes or no, this question works. If your prospect has, they’ll be eager to take precautions so it doesn’t happen again. If your prospect hasn’t, the wheels will start turning: Wow, it would be really bad if 20% of our business vanished in one stroke.

33) "How [did, would] losing that customer affect the business?"

Get the buyer to vocalize the negative effects, which will drive their desire to avoid the catastrophe even higher.

34) "How do you avoid getting caught in a pricing war?"

Chances are, your prospect would love to find a differentiator that would save them from race-to-the-bottom pricing. You just need to explain why your product is that differentiator.

35) "Are your customers asking for [feature/service] you don't have?"

If their customers are asking for something your prospect's business can't currently offer, that's asking for a competitor to fill a gap. If you can get your prospect thinking about what they don't have and how you can help them get it -- that's a good way to inspire urgency.

Ask about next steps

36) "Would you be interested in talking to [Customer], who saw a [X%] return on our [solution, service]?"

Hearing from someone who got fantastic results will spur your prospect to the finish line.

37) "Maybe it would be helpful for you to talk to someone who’s [made this journey recently, faced X similar challenge, resolved the same issue]. What do you think?"

If it’s too early in the sales process for references, suggest a knowledge-sharing conversation instead. You’re still connecting the buyer with a satisfied customer -- but their shared experiences are the focus, not your product.

The nice thing about this technique? Not only is it helpful for the prospect and your customer, but at some point during the conversation they’re bound to bring up your solution.

38) "If we supply all the information you need in the next 24 hours, will you have time to review it and get started by [date in the near future]?"

Test your prospect’s commitment to act with this question. If they say they’re not ready, don’t be pushy -- instead, ask what else they’d need to make a decision.

39) "If I send over the contract when we hang up, can you return it to me in [six days from the current date]?"

Sales consultant Jeff Hoffman encourages reps to close this way. Normally, the buyer says they’ll need more time -- at which point you say, “Okay, can you do [preliminary step] by that date?” They’ll say yes, and now you’ve gotten a concrete agreement to make progress on the deal within the week. Boom.

(Adjust the date based on your sales cycle. If it usually lasts two weeks, ask if they can sign the proposal that day. If it lasts 10 to 12 months, ask if they can sign the proposal in three weeks.)

40) "Define your timeline for solving the problem and getting the right results."

Make sure your prospect’s expectations align with reality. You may need to accelerate the sales process to meet their timeline.

41) "When must this problem be solved to avoid negative impact on the business?"

Get a firm deadline for the purchase. Explain to the prospect you should shoot for a few weeks or months before this deadline to protect against delays.

42) "Is there seasonality in your business? Do you have a busy or slow season? Do you need to address this problem before the busy or slow season hits?"

For prospects affected by seasonality (like education, tourism, and entertainment), it can be critical to get a solution in place while business is relatively quieter.

43) "If we can work out a solution sooner, how does that help you?"

Fixing a problem earlier rather than later is almost always a good thing. The best part about this question is that the buyer puts those benefits in their own words.

Look, I get it: You’ve probably been hearing a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots recently — about how they can help automate the sales process to improve efficiency by enabling sales teams to grow leads, reduce administrative tasks, and shorten sales cycles.

And while it might sound like science fiction, we’ve already started see the impact AI and bots are having on today’s sales process.

The Evolving Role of Sales

Research out of the McKinsey Global Institute (published in HBR) shows that…

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40% of time spent on sales work activities can now be automated using AI.
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But this doesn’t mean that sales reps need to worry about losing their jobs to bots.

As Alex Hillsberg wrote in his article “Artificial Intelligence: The Sales Renaissance is Here”:

“Offloading 40% of work doesn’t make you, the rep, less important. Just more efficient … At worst, sales reps need to adapt to a new role. They’ll be marketers, even managers, sort of. They need more analytical skills to derive insights out of data and use it to run territory campaigns.”

This is the sales rep of the future: no longer managing forms and spreadsheets, but managing intelligent lead capture and qualification campaigns.

Instead of going down a list of leads and calling them one-by-one to see if they’re a good fit, the sales rep of the future will spend more time behind the scenes, managing a fleet of bots that can qualify leads at scale.

How Do Bots Actually Improve Your Sales Process Efficiency?

For starters – At Drift, our sales reps don’t have desk phones.

Instead of spending the majority of their time dialing and smiling, they’re using messaging to talk to leads and to book demos in real-time.

Of course, selling in real-time via messaging has its challenges:

• How do you deal with all the volume? 
• How do you focus on having conversations with the most qualified leads?

We’ve been working on this problem for over a year now, and we’ve come up with a variety of tactics for dealing with it.

Here’s our step-by-step approach to automate an efficient sales process, including how bots fit into the picture.

1. Create Separate Conversation Inboxes for Sales, Support, Success, etc.

It’s super simple tweak to the sales process, but also super effective. At Drift, we have all incoming chats from leads get routed to a dedicated Sales inbox.

Here’s why this is a significant step for increasing sales process efficiency:

Reps Don’t Waste Time With Unqualified Leads

When we automate the right leads directly to the sales inbox, we ensure our sales reps don’t have to worry about answering customer support questions, or getting interrupted by random site visitors who have no intention of buying.

Bots Route Inbound Chats To The Right Department

Because routing incoming chats to the right department would be a tedious task for a human (especially during times when there’s a high volume of chats coming in) we have a bot take care of routing for us.

When a visitor drops by the site and starts a chat with us, the bot pops up and says:

“Hey! Would you like to talk to sales, support, or anyone?” and then routes the chat accordingly.

For those who respond “anyone,” we have the conversation get routed to an inbox we use for chatting with anonymous visitors. Everyone at Drift takes a shift monitoring this inbox and responding to folks, which brings me to step two.

2. Set Up Human Chat Shifts During Peak Hours

In theory, you could have bots reply to every incoming message you receive and never have a human get involved in the conversation…but what would be the point?

Bots Don’t Replace Humans, Just Enhance The Experience

At Drift, we think about bots as existing to facilitate better human-to-human interaction, not automate humans out of the picture. That’s why everyone at the company has a specified day and time when they do “chat duty.”

By having a real human present to chat during peak hours, we’re able to keep an eye on our bots (who are still learning) and make sure our visitors, leads, and customers are getting the answers and outcomes they’re looking for.

Anytime someone requests to talk to a real person, or if we see someone struggling to get the information they’re looking for from one of our bots, we can hop in right away.

3. Set Up Real-Time Push Notifications For Hot Leads

In addition to being “on-call” in case leads decide to initiate conversations, our sales reps can choose to get push notifications when one of their target leads is live on the website.

Enabling Reps to Proactively Engage Prospects

We want our reps to start chats with leads and ask if they need help with anything. It’s just like having a salesperson greet someone at the door of a brick-and-mortar store (only it’s online, and that store is your website).

Of course, from a scalability perspective, having reps send individual messages to particular leads as soon as those leads land on the website can get a bit problematic.

Our solution: We created targeted bot campaigns that can appear to specific visitors, leads, and customers and engage with them in real-time.

Here are three examples of how we’re using those bot campaigns to proactively drive sales.

How to Use Bots to Capture Leads

A year ago, our CEO decided to ungate all of our content and get rid of lead forms.

That left the marketing team in a peculiar spot. Because without forms, how were we supposed to generate leads for the sales team?

Turns out that you can capture (and qualify) leads on your website entirely through messaging. And thanks to bots, that can happen at scale.

Leveraging Bots on the Blog

For example, we recently launched a bot campaign on our blog. The bot asks visitors two questions:

1. “How’d you find the Drift blog?“
2. “Want to join the 15,000 marketing/sales geniuses who get our emails every week? Just drop your email below.”
   

Unlike a form, the bot is interactive, and can give different follow-up responses based on what people answer.

Another thing the bot can do that a form can’t: route leads to the right department, or even route them to the right salesperson (based on sales territory/geography).

That way, leads who are interested in learning more can have 1:1 conversations with sales right away, instead of having to wait for a phone or email follow up.

How to Use Bots to Qualify Leads

Just like with lead capture campaigns, you can run lead qualification campaigns with bots that target specific pages of your website.

We display these bots on our high intent pages, like our pricing page, so we can hone in on qualifying just those leads who are likely to buy.

When it comes to writing scripts for our lead qualification bots, we follow the this approach:

• What?
• Who?
• How?
• CTA 

Here’s how it all works:

Step 1 – We have the bot ask leads what brought them to our website (or to a particular page on our site).

Step 2 – We have the bot ask leads who they are. (What company do they work at?)

Step 3 – The last question the bot asks is how they’re thinking about using the product (e.g. for accomplishing x, y, or z?).

Step 4 – Finally, we end the bot’s script with a call-to-action (CTA)

One of the best CTAs would be to schedule a product demo with a sales rep. From within the messaging window, the bot can show leads the times you have open on your calendar, and — after they pick one — it can send meeting invitations to both sides.

And because these bot campaigns can run around the clock, 24/7, sales reps can qualify leads while they’re asleep and wake up to find new meetings on their calendars.

According to research from InsideSales.com…

After a lead reaches out, the best time to follow up is within the first 5 minutes.

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Responding to leads in 10 minutes vs. 5 minutes decreases odds of qualifying that lead by 400%.
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By having bots on your site that can respond to leads in real-time, your sales team will always be able to follow up within that critical 5-minute window.

Now that’s what I call sales process efficiency!

How to Use Bots to Upsell Existing Customers

In addition to using bots to capture and qualify leads on your website, your sales and customer success teams can use them in-app to upsell and cross-sell existing customers.

For example, if you wanted to encourage folks on your “Basic” plan to upgrade to your “Pro” plan, you could send a targeted in-app message to just your “Basic” plan customers.

Or, if you launched a new product feature within a specific section of your app, you could run an in-app campaign that only appeared when customers navigated to that part of your app.

At Drift, we recommend keeping the scripts for these types of upsell campaigns short and sweet.

After all, these are people who are already paying to use your product. So while you want to alert them to new features and help them get more value out of your product, you also don’t want to annoy them.

When we recently launched an in-app bot campaign for a new product feature, we had the bot ask a single question:

“Any questions about [this feature]?”

A CTA then appeared that prompted customers to schedule a demo with us if they wanted to learn more.

Final Thought

Selling with bots isn’t about removing humans entirely from the sale process, it’s about making sure the humans on your sales team are joining the right conversations at the right times.

By removing complexity from the sales process, and allowing reps to focus more of their time on having quality conversations, bots are poised to help sales teams become more efficient than ever before.

The post How To Automate An Efficient Sales Process With Bots appeared first on Sales Hacker.

“Is your sales process be considered an asset or a liability when it comes to closing deals?

Most of the time, it’s easier to see the blind spots of others than our own. In sales, ignorance is a disadvantage. In order to become effective in sales, you must learn to recognize the things you don’t know in your sales process instead of focusing on your competitors and see the reality with an objective eye.

According to Apttus and Adobe 2014 Sales Survey, many organizations are unaware that their processes are lengthening sales cycles and bleeding top – line revenue.

When we say blind spots, we’re not only talking about Sales Reps. I‘ve divided this article to highlight how we can help Sales Reps, as well as CEOs and Sales Managers in IT and Software Industry recognize the biggest and the most common blind spots they tend to neglect in their sales process.

Here are some of the biggest blind spots of CEOs and Sales Managers in IT and Software Industry.

#1: “We hire professional and experienced sales reps, so we can save money on training.”

IT and Software industry have their own language. If your sales reps are not familiar with some of the technical words used, then they’ll have a hard time getting the message across your prospects. Lack of product knowledge makes agents lose confidence when calling. Even if they have the skills, they won’t be able to handle objections well because they don’t have enough knowledge and understanding of what he is offering.

#2: “We have good relationship with our clients.”

Good job! But do you know about their plans next year? Have you met with them face to face? Does that mean they will continue to patronize your product or service? We all know that there are a lot of competitors that can also provide good and quality service and they might consider later on. Having a good relationship with your client isn’t enough. You have to evolve and continue to provide better services that you used to. You can even offer them a referral promotions and make them refer you.

#3: “Salespeople are motivated by money.”

Sure, money is a great way to motivate your reps to perform well. But money isn’t everything. Many American corporations spend nearly $50 billion on incentives every year. There are other ways to incentivize your reps. Travel and merchandise awards can motivate them more and are remembered longer than cash incentives. Also, salespeople want to be recognized based on their performance.

On the other hand, it’s easy for Sales reps to see the problem with the script and list that they’re calling. But they have a huge blind spot on how they deliver their calls and the process on how to do it.

Here are some of Sales reps’ most significant blind spots when calling:

Over or Under-Selling

You might think it’ll do you good. However, over or under selling usually do harm than good. If a salesperson continues his sales pitch even after the prospect has expressed his interest may annoy your prospect and could change their mind. Under selling on the other hand simply shows lack of product knowledge or a lazy sales rep that’s not doing his job well. A good salespeople knows how to identify when to close a sale and when the customer is ready to buy.

Solution…

Provide your sales pitch to prospects but only highlight those important details.

Forgetting Warm Leads

You‘ve encountered a prospect who’s interested in your product or service but is not available to discuss about it when you called. The following day, you report to work flooded with return emails and phone calls and you’ve forgotten to follow up on that warm lead. Chances are you’ll lose that sale. Multitasking can make sales reps forget something because a lot is going on inside of their head.

Solution…

• Always set a reminder for yourself with complete details as to what happened on the call.
• Keep details of some of his concerns to answer any questions that may arise.
• Prepare before making a call. This way, you won’t forget anything and eventually close the sale.
• If you’re not available to follow up on them, ask somebody to do this for you and provide all of the information needed.

#4: Leaving little but important tasks unfinished

During a phone call, sales reps tend to neglect little tasks that might help them on their calls because they think it’s not important. Leaving a job unfinished means leaving money on the table. You might think it’s just a small task but it may be useful for you in the future. The most important part of a salesperson’s job when making a call is to maximize every call.

Here are some of the little but important task that sales reps tend to forget when making a call:

• Not asking for the best time to call.
• Not maximizing the call and look for other decision makers to talk to.
• Not gathering information especially if decision makers are not available.

Solution…

It’s hard to get hold of IT Managers, IT Directors, VPs and C level people because they are always busy. List down all the things that need to be accomplished on your call and practice doing it on every call.

#5: Maximizing all possible opportunities

Maximize all possibilities to close a sale. Dropping the phone when prospect says they’re not interested at the beginning of the call without them knowing your product is a lose opportunity. You need to get an answer on every call even if the prospect answers “No”. Also, offer other products or services offered especially if they need something else but you also provide those services.

Neglecting these blind spots, even the simplest one because you don’t understand the reason why you need to do it may grow bigger over time and can threaten your career. So start practicing and applying these blind spots on your day to day activities as sales reps to improve your company’s marketing strategies.

This post originally appeared at The Savvy Marketer.

Russia seems to be using Syria as a testing ground and way to advertise some of its most-advanced weaponry, experts say.

For the last couple of years, Moscow has almost gone out if its way to broadcast their engagements and equipment being used in Syria, while simultaneously denying any involvement in the Ukrainian war. 

"Russia is using Syria as a way to showcase its weaponry for export sales," Omar Lamrani, an analyst with Stratfor, told Business Insider, specifically mentioning their SU-34 fighter jet and cruise missiles. 

Russian-state owned media reported Wednesday that the Kremlin has been testing its new 'soldier of the future' combat gear in Syria. 

"The Ratnik combat is a system of advanced protective and communication equipment, weapons and ammunition," TASS said. "It comprises around 40 protective and life support elements and allows a soldier to get continuously updated information about situation in the combat area. In addition, the Ratnik includes a self-contained heater, a backpack, an individual water filter, a gas mask and a medical kit."

Russia is even developing a Ratnik-3, an advanced version "with an integral exoskeleton and a helmet visor-mounted target designation system."

 

Meanwhile, Algeria ordered 12 Russian SU-34 jets in January 2016, and many other countries have expressed interest, including Indonesia, India, Malaysia as well as Nigeria, Uganda and Ethiopia and others. 

Russia's SU-35s, which have been frequently used in Syria, have also been selling well. China purchased 24 of them in November 2015, Indonesia purchased 10 in April 2016, and the United Arab Emirates also bought 10 in March. Many other designs, including the SU-30M, have been flying off the shelves since Moscow got involved in Syria. 

And Moscow has not hid these sales. In fact, they've widely broadcasted their exports through state-sponsored media outlets.  

But there has been a human cost to Russia's arms advertisements. Their airstrikes killed between 2,704 and 9,364 Syrian civilians between October 2015 and August 2016. And the raids have not stopped. The Idilb province in Syria has been badly hit in recent months, including multiple hospitals, which Amnesty International accused Russia and Syria of striking intentionally. 

It should be noted that US airstrikes have also killed Syrian civilians. In late October 2016, an Amnesty International report said that coalition bombs had killed 300 civilians. And a more recent report detailed how coalition strikes killed more Syrians than Russia and ISIS combined in March, due to the recently established no-fly zones.

Moscow has also tried to showcase its cruise missiles, launching them at times when it wasn't even necessary. In late 2015, they hit Raqqa with cruise missiles from a stealth Rostov-on-Don submarine. 

“The missiles launched from the submarine were more of a political weapon aimed at Washington, rather than a military one aimed at ISIS,” Chris Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Foreign Policy in 2015. “There is no tactical reason for Russia to fire a cruise missile. They are using these to show the world that they can.”

Russia not only "wants to showcase itself as a major power," Lamrani told Business Insider, but they also want to use "Syria as a strategic way to negotiate with the US."

In other words, Moscow was trying to show the west that they were fighting ISIS together, in the hopes that the US and EU would loosen sanctions imposed on them after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. 

Interestingly, Moscow publicly denies any role in the war in eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin has deployed troops and even funds and manages the rebels fighting Kyiv. 

The Kremlin's public relations strategy in Ukraine differs in part from that in Syria because "Russia sees Ukraine as this brotherly nation, and the war in Ukraine doesn't play well in Russia — a sort of brother on brother action," Matthew Czekaj, a program associate for the Europe and Eurasia program at the Jamestown Foundation, told Business Insider. 

In fact, Moscow has been "carrying out a roulement, or rolling deployment, of troops from across the whole of its Armed Forces to the Ukrainian border," according to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report. Not only does this provide a more efficient and cost effective way of training its forces, giving them first hand combat experience, but it also possibly better hides from Russians back home why they're gone, Lamrani said. 

Furthermore, Russia is more covert in Ukraine because they fear "that the war in Ukraine could spark a retaliation by NATO," Czekaj said. 

So ultimately, what Moscow publicly acknowledges in Syria and doesn't acknowledge in Ukraine is a consequence of their different goals in each country. They not only want to negotiate with the west and advertise their arms in Syria, but they also want to be seen as a power player in the Middle East. They want to be a power player in the Baltics too, especially Ukraine.

But they only want the right people to know about it. 

SEE ALSO: Amnesty: Russian, Syrian government forces target hospitals

Join the conversation about this story »

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A Note From Alice: One of my big takeaways from Sales 3.0 was that in the face of new technology, sales leaders, and business owners must focus on their humanity when dealing with clients. My friend Brian Carroll wrote a great post at the www.b2bleadblog.com about how important empathy is to sales, and I wanted to share it with you.

With more communication channels and content than ever before, it’s become harder to connect with customers. They’re weary of pitches, cold emails, hype, and manipulative messages. So, they tune them out.

As sales leaders and business owners push reps to get leads, drive opportunities and move the needle, it’s easy to forget to address the fears, hopes, wants, and aspirations of the customer.

But, here’s the kicker, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered, “We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”

Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery that when emotions are impaired, so is decision-making. This means we need to go beyond logic to understand how our customers feel.

Customers aren’t saying, “We need solutions.” Instead, they’re saying, “We need to solve a problem.” What would happen if your sales team focused on helping them do just that? To do that, you need to train your team to think empathetically—to share your customer’s feelings and think what they think.

What Is Empathic Marketing And Selling?

Empathetic marketing and selling is about moving away from business-centric thinking to customer-centric thinking. It’s built on the following ideas:

• The best selling feels like helping.
• Selling isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you do for people.
• Focus on empathizing with your customer’s feelings and understanding their problems.
• Think like your clients when they set out to solve a problem and discover each step they may take to solve that problem.
• Understand ways you can help make your customers lives better.
• Provide your customers what they want by understanding what motivates them.
• Help clients identify and solve problems.
• Give customers content and expertise that helps them gain clarity.
• Empower employees who touch your customers with the resources, training, and tools to really help them.

Here are seven ways you can to practice empathetic marketing and selling.

1. Put Your Customers First

Instead of trying to sound interesting to others, be interested in them. Understand your customer’s motivation (what they want) and make sure it’s something you can deliver. The root word of emotion and motivate is the same. Buyers base most of their actions on feelings and then backfill with logic. That’s why it’s so important to get beyond the product to and speak to the end results and the feelings your buyer seeks.

2. Listen And Seek To Understand

Join your sales reps on customer visits and just listen and seek to understand customer motivations. It’s shocking how little of this happens. Too often we rely on survey data or focus groups, but empathy is not the product of survey data. It helps you intuitively interpret the context and understand the pressures facing your customer. The key to understanding another person is empathetic listening—trying to understand everything (including the nonverbal signals) the other person is communicating. What emotions are motivating them? You listen for feeling, for meaning, for behavior and other signals.

3. Stop Pushing, Start Conversing

Focus on developing conversations. Don’t err on the side of pushing your agenda rather than extending an invitation to converse. It’s the difference between a customer thinking “somebody wants something from me” and “maybe they can help me get what I want.” Train your team to demonstrate that they’re interested in the customer’s world and motivations. Use empathy maps and personas to understand your customer and how to better connect with them in conversations. For more on this read Copyblogger: Empathy Maps: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head. Invite, listen, engage and recommend.

4. The Best Selling Feels Like Helping (Because It Is)

Our sales efforts and lead nurturing are anchored on this idea. As customers, we can feel when someone’s trying to push us to do something. And we also recognize when someone sincerely cares. They’re not trying to push their agenda, and they’re genuinely trying to help us.

5. Give Content They’ll Want To Share

This content organically emerges from the first four points of placing the customer first, understanding them, conversing with them and helping them. But so much of today’s content does not do that. We’ve become publishing machines, creating content for content’s sake. Customers don’t need more content. They need useful content that helps them convince colleagues inside their companies to choose a different path. Much of the content I see lacks that empathetic context and content without empathy is just noise. It becomes very noisy in the B2B marketing.

6. Remember That Proximity Is Influence

Empower those closest to your customer (your sales team, sales development reps, inside sales, and customer service people) to be able to achieve the points above. We formulate our opinions about companies based on our interactions with their people.

7. Practice Empathy Personally To Set An Example

Be the change you want to see. Our customers are everyone we serve—including our staff and our coworkers. Show how it’s done by practicing empathy yourself.

This all may seem altruistic, but it’s not. It has an economic benefit. If we can give customers what they want, we can create a competitive advantage that will reap higher margins and profits.

For example, Slack (currently the fastest growing start-up in history) practices empathy as part of their core values. In this interview, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stated, “It’s very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.”

Additionally, IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest design company. As part of their boot camps, employees are learning how to apply empathy to connect better with colleagues and clients. They’re learning how to tap into their customers’ and colleagues’ feelings and the need to come up with better solutions.

IDEO’s Empathy on Edge puts it this way, “When organizations allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams and even their organization at large—they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.”

Our job is to make each person we connect with online and offline—feel as if they are the most important person in the room (because they are.)

Do you want to help your sales team sell with empathy? Alice can help! Call her to chat about it at 775-852-5020 or schedule an appointment.

The post How To Grow Your Sales With Empathy appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Lead scoring is not a new concept – It’s been around for more than a decade now. From the start, it’s been used by sales and marketing teams to determine if a lead is sales-ready or if it needs to be nurtured.

In most corporations, the marketing team generates leads and the sales team closes deals. However, nowadays thanks to software , an outbound sales team can also generate quality leads. Indeed, sales reps can easily find prospects within a database of 200 million decision-makers. The implication is that an outbound sales team can find a good fit more easily. However, not every lead a team generates is responsive. Some need to be nurtured while others are sales-ready. For this reason, even if you target the right leads, it’s a good idea to have a lead scoring system in place.

Not having a lead scoring system in place to assess lead quality can translate into:

• Wasted resources
• The loss of a potential customer
• Lower conversion rates
• Slow response times

Wasted resources

Engaging with a bad lead comes at a cost. It takes up time that you could spend building a relationship with a good lead.

To avoid wasting resources, your demand generation team should take over and write outbound email campaigns, send them to your target customers, and score the level of engagement of the leads. In this way, they can select which leads should be nurtured and which are sales-ready.

Regardless of whether it is the demand generation or the sales team that sends the outbound emails, it is important to track them and analyze the behavior of the prospects. Once the tool you’re using has identified the “hot leads,” you can engage and follow up with these leads in a more personalized email campaign. Thus your sales team only focuses on positive responses and stops wasting time following up.

The loss of a potential customer

Engaging with a lead that needs to be nurtured and that is not sales-ready will result in the loss of a potential customer. This is another reason why it is important to use a lead scoring system. If not, your sales team will incur a double loss: a loss of both time and a potential client.

Lower conversion rates

Lead scoring is also effective at detecting new client interests. For instance, if one of your clients buys a product but then shows interest in another product, then your lead scoring system will detect this and inform the sales team. This allows them to ensure a timely follow-up and take advantage of potential cross-sells and upsells.

Unsatisfactory timeliness of response

According to the Demand Gen report, the timeliness of a vendor’s response to inquiries is the number one reason why buyers choose a winning vendor. This means that the sales team needs to know on the spot which lead has turned hot so that they can follow up in a timely manner and not lose the deal.

Difference between predictive lead scoring and traditional lead scoring

The main goal of lead scoring is to qualify leads. With traditional lead scoring, the marketing team, with the help of the sales team, needs to set out a series of qualifying factors that will define if a lead is qualified for that business. Some examples of possible criteria are demographics, website visits, and email clickthroughs. Points are assigned to key criteria, and it is possible to both add points and decrease points. For example, if the lead hits a specific number of visits you can add +10 points. Depending on the score of the lead you will then either transfer it to the sales team or nurture it.

Predictive lead scoring makes life easier for the sales and marketing teams, by aligning them more closely. For instance, it is a lead scoring algorithm that predicts who in your database is qualified or not qualified. Of course, different tools will take into account different information when predicting the score.

In conclusion, while an outbound sales team is able to generate very targeted leads thanks to the use of sales prospecting tools, it is still important to have a lead scoring system that helps you boost productivity and ultimately close more deals.

In terms of getting qualified sales leads, trade shows are basically your best bet. For a start, these activities allow businesses to interact and engage with their audience in a more straightforward manner. In other words, it is like finding the right person through speed dating.

Okay, not a very good comparison, but trade shows are always a good source of qualified sales leads. In fact, a lot of companies depend on trade shows in order to grow their networks as much as they want to grow their sales. As we can tell from the juicy numbers provided by SkyLine Trade Show Tips.

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At least 82% of tradeshow attendees have buying authority and that “99% of marketers said they found unique value from trade shows they did not get from other marketing mediums.”

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Now that you know how trade shows are important marketing opportunities, you may want to determine the best ways to make the most out of your trade show experience. To get your first customer through a trade show, take a look at this important steps.

#1. Presentation is important

Design your booth in a way that attracts potential customers. Do not always settle with cliched tropes like cardboard cutouts and big LCD screens. Go for more creative ways to give some pizzazz to your first trade show appearance. In other words, always aim for impact as well as substance. Never go for anything less. You have all the resources you need to make your first impression that much significant to any interested trade show attendee. Check out these Emerging Marketing Tools to Be Use for Promoting Events

#2. Giveaways and “party favors”

Trade shows are actually big festivals where like-minded people can mingle and talk about issues concerning their respective industries.And like most parties, everyone expects a little something to take home with them. Giving away free stuff like ballers and pens with your brand’s logo on them provide a good relief from the usual practice of handing out boring flyers. Instead of doing the usual things trade show exhibitors do, go for promotional material in the form of simple yet usable stuff.

Here’s what we did during Dreamforce 2016 event that had garnered sales closes:

#3. Listen and engage

Hello. You’re in a trade show, which means you are here to make your voice heard. And there’s no other perfect reason to be in one anyway. You are a business that offers solutions, and so you need to act like someone who reaches out to the attendees rather than beg them to hear you out. Effective talking points that address problems related to IT security and effective POS systems will eventually convince your target audience to listen to you from a sea of attendees.

There’s no better way to interact with your potential clients than through trade shows. If you’re curious what else is there for marketers to use in order to grow sales, then you might want to read other insightful stuff in our blog.

This post originally appeared at The Savvy Marketer.

Before you go to the next article, I know what you’re thinking: “Ugh, something about baseball. So boring.”

But this article isn’t really about baseball -- it’s about a single lesson I learned through playing baseball over 20 years that I now apply to sales every day.

I’ll go ahead and take the rabbit out of the hat now. That lesson is, “Act like you've been here before."

How Hitting a Triple Taught Me That Single Lesson

I was 14 years old and playing in a tryout for an AAU baseball team, The Seadogs. AAU stands for the Amateur Athletic Union, and at least as far as baseball goes, it has a history of producing some pretty top-notch talent. 

I was up to the plate in this game, and I hit a gapper to right center field. The ball carried all the way to the fence, and I was hustling around first base. Mind you, I wasn’t exactly what you would call “slender” (I stood 5’10” and weighed 180 lbs at this age). I kept hustling, trying to build up more and more momentum as I “sprinted” towards second base.

And then something happened that never happened before. I felt my feet still beneath me and they were carrying me past second base. It was as if my feet knew better than my mind, and they were carrying me straight for third. I couldn’t believe it! Normally at this point, I was sliding either feet-first or head-first into second base, gasping for air and wiping the dirt off my pants. This time was different.

So I chugged and I chugged, as fast as my feet would carry my man-boy frame. I could see the third baseman on the opposing team preparing to catch the throw coming in from right field to tag me out. I slid head-first, grabbed the bag, and heard the umpire exclaim, “SAFE!”

I couldn’t have been happier. I had done it -- it was the first triple I had ever hit! I popped up with a big grin on my face, pumped my fist in celebration, and stood on the bag waiting for the game to continue.

What happened next made my stomach drop to my shoes with embarrassment. My third base coach grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear, “Sig, stop acting like an amateur. Act like you’ve been here before. It’ll intimidate them.”

My 14-year-old mind had been blown. How could I have been so stupid? Why was I acting like it was a complete miracle that I had hit a triple? I should have had more faith in myself, in my training, in all of my practice. The countless hours I spent trying to improve every aspect of my game.

And the coach was right -- I should have acted like I had been there before. Because it wasn’t just about the intimidation and the professionalism. It was also about the power of positivity and what we are able to achieve when we keep ourselves in the right head space. Remaining in that positive frame of mind, I went on to hit four more triples throughout that season. 

How I Apply that Single Lesson to Sales Today

When I embarked on my HubSpot journey, I had no idea what I was doing. I remember getting to my desk the first day on the job and looking at our contact database. I wondered, “How do I turn this into sales?”

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So I diligently walked over to my manager’s desk and said, “Dannie, I’m ready to start selling. What do I do?” She smiled softly and said, “Well, I suggest you get on the phone. I’ll send you a list of 50 leads to start working now.” I figured that was fair enough.

I started calling, and miraculously, people were answering. And it wasn’t just the first person I called. It was the first four in a row. I couldn’t believe it. I figured, “Man, this is going to be so easy. Why didn’t I start working in sales sooner?”

It turns out that the little stroke of luck I had early on was just that: A stroke of luck. Of course, over the following months I realized how hard sales was and how hard I would have to work to be successful. I kept at it.

In my fifth month on the job (around October 2012), the wheels completely flew off. I had lost all of my confidence, I really didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t getting anyone to take my calls, or take follow-on calls in our exploratory process. I was defeated. And of course, the deals weren’t coming in.

In the third week of October, our VP of Sales, Pete Caputa, came over to my desk and said something to the effect of (and I’m paraphrasing), “Sig, what’s going on? Your numbers are way off this month and you sound awful on the phone. What’s worse is that you sound desperate, and you’re eroding the value of how we help our customers grow and scale their business. Why are you doing that?”

I scrambled for answers, but couldn’t find them. When Pete realized this, he looked me in the eye and said, “You have to always sell like you’re already at your number.”

And then the lightbulb went off again. I was taken straight back to that 14-year-old version of myself and was reminded that to be successful I had to believe I would be successful.

If I exhibited doubt, the people I were talking to would have zero reason to speak with me. If I didn’t believe in what I was doing, why should they? If they didn’t believe in my ability, why would they want to partner with me? And if I was acting desperately in the sales process -- for example, doing “easy way out” selling, like offering discounts -- wouldn’t they start to question whether or not the product I was selling was actually a smart investment? Of course!

Carrying That Single Lesson Forward into Leadership

From then on, in my next 20-plus months in the sales funnel, I only missed my number twice. Both times I missed I was still above 90%. I can’t say for sure whether or not it was this single moment that turned me around, but it’s a lesson I try to teach all of my team members to this day: “The second you start doubting yourself and throwing pity parties is the exact moment at which your ability to succeed is in great jeopardy.”

My advice for any individual contributor reading this: If you’re ever struggling, check the tone of your voice and your sales behavior. The fastest way to lose a deal is through desperation. And the fastest way to get back on track is to start “selling” like you’re already at or way above your number at all times.

My advice for any leader reading this: If you have team members struggling, figure out if your reps are in this negative headspace. Figure out if they actually believe crushing their numbers is possible. And if they don’t, maybe share my story with them. Or better yet, think back through your life and tell a story of your own.

Finally, for anyone reading this and thinking, “Man, this is really kumbaya. I don’t buy it,” I would encourage you to read this article. (Essentially, it has been scientifically proven that people with dispositional optimism are more successful and healthier than those who are not.)

Onward and upward.