Rnordman

Why do customers delete voicemails without acting on them? What causes salespeople to fail getting in the door with important accounts?

Leaving poorly communicated voicemails is one of the main reasons for not getting in the door and why customers hit ‘delete’ instead.

If your customer would be honest and tell you why your voicemails aren’t being acted on, they might say something like this…

Dear Salesperson:

“I just deleted your voice mail. Seriously, did you think I’d actually call you back?

You couldn’t possible know how many voicemails and emails I get every day. What’s more, I’m so BUSY I don’t have the time or patience to listen all the way through an irrelevant or sales-pitchy message!

If you want a better chance that I’ll call you back,

DO NOT…

1. Sound like a salesperson.
2. Hem and haw around saying, “uh,” “um,” “and uh…”
3. Brag on your product or company.
4. Try to convince me your product is something I should buy.
5. Use worn-out sales expressions like, “I was just following up,” or “I was hoping to get some time on your calendar to tell you about our…”
6. Speak your company’s jargon.
7. Come across as hesitant or uncomfortable.
8. Speak too fast and make me have to re-listen to your message.
9. Put me in a box and assume that my needs are the very same as your customers.
10. Bore me with unnecessary wordiness and never get to the point.
11. Pronounce my company’s name or my name incorrectly.
12. Talk so quietly I can hardly hear you.
13. Assume I got your contact information down the first time.”

Sincerely,

Your Customer

 

Now, there’s no doubt that trying to get a prospect to return a voicemail is very challenging.

For your voicemail to break through, seize their attention and get them to act

TRY THIS ADVICE:

• Address what they care about, not what you want to sell them.
• Be prepared and well organized.
• Do you homework and know their company before you call.
• Speak concisely, confidently and clearly. Repeat your contact info.
• Give them a compelling reason why they should call you back – how do they benefit?
• Give them a valuable insight, or ask a thought-provoking question and make the connection to why you are calling.
• Keep your message under 30 seconds.

Follow the fundamentals and stop leaving information that gets your voicemail deleted if you want better results.

Most business owners are well aware of the ability to advertise on Facebook, but not all of them realize the potential power that this opportunity holds. With billions of active users every month, the marketing stage is wide open—all you need to do is find the right audience. But with so many people, how exactly do you do that? If you’re wondering how to market your business on Facebook, you’re not alone.

In this post, we’ll go over some of the best methods for leveraging Facebook advertising to get actual results. That’s right—not just “Likes,” but real, money-making results.

How to Market Your Business on Facebook in 5 Steps

1. Setting Up a Business Page

Before we get into the details of how to setup and optimize your paid campaigns, you first need to make sure that your business is well-represented on Facebook. If you haven’t already, set up a business page with your current contact information and a high-resolution image of your logo. If you have a physical store location, you should add your address so that local users can find you.

In order to look professional, you should also have an on-brand cover photo. You can also encourage customers to give you a rating, which will increase your reputability. Be sure that you update the page regularly with content that your followers and other members of your target audience will find enjoyable. Remember, it’s important to give people a reason to click that “like” button. If all you do is post boring promos for your own products, there’s not much reason for people to connect with you.

Additionally, you can register your business’ Facebook page so that it has a blue or grey check mark beneath your profile photo. This lets users know that it’s your official page. Note, however, that not all businesses will be eligible for this. Check the terms on Facebook to learn more.

Once you’ve completed your business page set up and started posting content and gaining new followers, it’s time to begin your paid advertising campaigns.

2. Identifying & Targeting Your Audience

How to market your business on Facebook has a lot to do with advertising to the right people. There are billions of potential customers on Facebook, but not every single one of them will be interested in what you’re selling. But don’t let that overwhelm you! The beauty of the Facebook advertising platform is that it has incredibly detailed targeting features that allow you to narrow down your audience to a very specific group of people.

Before you hop into Facebook’s Audience tool, you have to figure out who your target audience is. The best way to do this is to create a buyer persona. Essentially, a fictional profile based on actual data from market research from your customer base. This includes buying behaviors, demographics, pain points, goals, and more. Once you gain a comprehensive understanding of the type of people who are already buying your products, it will be far easier to find new consumers.

You can now use the information you’ve collected and input it into Facebook’s audience tool. For example, let’s say you own a car cover company. After taking a look at the data from your existing customers, you notice that most of them are men between the ages of 35 and 60 who recently purchased a car from luxury brands like Mercedes, BMW, and Lexus. You can use Facebook’s unique targeting features to reach people who meet those exact specifications:

Another cool targeting feature on Facebook is its Lookalike option. This allows you to import a list of current customers, and Facebook will use their information to find new consumers who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.

3. Retargeting to Existing Leads

In addition to targeting new consumers on Facebook, you can also create retargeting campaigns. Retargeting campaigns allow you to advertise to people who have already shown interest in your product or service but haven’t made a purchase yet. For example, say someone browses through your product catalog, adds a few items to their cart, and then leaves it there without checking out. You could launch a retargeting ad to remind them to return to your site. Because these consumers need a little extra push, it’s best to add a sense of urgency to your ad by using phrases like “Last chance!” or “Ends today!” You could even offer a special discount code as added incentive.

In order to launch retargeting campaigns, you need to install a Facebook Pixel on your site. The Pixel tracks user activity, allowing you to advertise to people based on their behavior on your site. For example, you could display ads to people who have visited specific URLs or who have added something to their cart without converting.

4. Setting Up Your Campaigns

When you create a campaign on Facebook, you will first have to pick a campaign objective. Facebook uses the objective you select to choose how to distribute your ads. There are several options for you to choose from:

• Awareness

• • Brand Awareness – Increase awareness for your brand by reaching people who are more likely to be interested in it.
  • Reach – Show your ad to the maximum number of people. Local awareness targeting is now part of reach.

• Consideration

• • Traffic – Send more people to a destination on or off Facebook. Now you can drive traffic by adding an offer to your campaign.
  • Engagement – Get more post engagements, Page likes, event responses or offer claims.
  • App Installs – Get more people to install your app. Now includes the former mobile app installs and desktop app installs objectives.
  • Video Views – Get more people to view your video content.
  • Lead Generation – Drive more sales leads, such as email addresses, from people interested in your brand or business.

• Conversion

• • Conversions – Drive valuable actions on your website or app. Now you can drive conversions by adding an offer to your campaign.
  • Product Catalogue Sales – Create ads that automatically show products from your product catalog based on your target audience.
  • Store Visits – Get more people nearby to visit your brick-and-mortar locations.

For example, if your main objective is to build a following for your brand, then you would want to select the Awareness > Brand Awareness objective. This way, Facebook will optimize your ad to be delivered to as many interested people as possible.

Most businesses want to set up campaigns that are designed to make sales. If this is true for you, then you would want to select one of the conversion categories. If you’re trying to increase sales at a physical store, you’d want to select the “Store Visits” category. If you want to run automated retargeting ads based on specific products that people have viewed, select the “Product Catalog Sales” option. And finally, if you want to create your own ads (retargeting or otherwise), you should select the “Conversions” campaign option.

Once you’ve created a campaign, you’ll need to create an ad set. Let’s say you choose the conversions objective for your campaign. Now, you’ll need to tell Facebook what you consider to be a conversion by selecting a conversion event. For example, if you select “Add to Cart,” Facebook will optimize your ads for the most add to carts. If you select “Purchase,” Facebook will optimize your ads for the most purchases.

After you’ve selected your conversion event, you’ll select the audience that you created, choose your ad placement options, set your budget, and your conversion window. After you’ve completed the ad set, it’s time to start importing your creatives.

5. Designing Your Creatives

When designing your creatives, it’s important to keep in mind that people scroll through a lot of content every day. In order for your campaigns to be successful, you will have to create captivating ads that stand apart from all the other ads and posts that are clogging up each user’s newsfeed. You can achieve this both through colorful, original images and well-written ad copy that matches your brand essence.

Because the newsfeed background is white, images without color tend to get lost in the shuffle. Instead, try using bright colors that capture the eye. It’s also important that you don’t just upload a stock photo. Stock photos are more recognizable than you’d think, and they don’t do much to show off the value of your brand. Instead, create original graphics and be sure to include an image or other representation of your product. This is especially important if you’re showing your ads to new consumers who have never heard of your brand before. Make it clear what your product is and why they need it. If they have to guess, well, they won’t—they’ll just keep scrolling.

You should also include some type of messaging on your actual ad image. However, because Facebook restricts the amount of text overlay you can use, be wise about what you choose to write. Facebook got rid of their mandatory requirement for ads to have less than 20 percent text. However, even though you can now use as much text as you want, ads with more text will have poorer deliverability.

And finally, don’t make the rookie mistake of neglecting your ad copy. Once you’ve got a consumer’s attention, your ad copy will be the deciding factor in whether or not they click on your ad. You should include product highlights, any special offer you choose to include, and a brief description of your product. Just be sure to make it interesting. And remember, adding a sense of urgency can help motivate people to make a purchase right then and there.

Final Takeaways

Marketing on Facebook can be an awesome way to boost revenue and build a following for your brand. After reading these tips, you should have a better understanding of how to market your business on Facebook. So, are you ready? It’s time to start building your own campaigns and creatives! Use the information outlined in this post to help guide you, and feel free to reach out to our team if you have any questions along the way.

Not much has changed in the 60 years since IBM first formalized sales channel management with the BANT approach. When IBM first developed BANT, the objective was to create a basic sales call structure designed to find marketing qualified leads for their salespeople. It was a simple 4-step approach to teaching new salespeople how to sell. A lead was considered qualified when the prospect met the first three of the four BANT criteria. A BANT score determined the prospect’s readiness to purchase.

The fourth criteria, Time Frame, became the driving force for the salesperson to continue calling on the prospect. In other words, it was only a matter of time before the prospect would purchase. Most seasoned salespeople will tell you that making a sale is a waiting game, but does that still hold true today?

The BANT approach to making a sale still holds true for most individual purchase decisions, and in case anyone doubts price is a strong driver to purchase, they only need to look at Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, to see how having lower prices than their competitors built their business. But purchase decisions are not always driven by price alone. The rise of luxury products, and exclusive access services, like Amazon Prime, prove that there is a segment of the population who aren’t price driven. They are purchasing ‘exclusivity’. The desire to have something others can’t afford is enough of a purchase driver in that space.

Most people will agree that the computer and technology sector has changed more than any other sector since IBM was the dominant player in the computer industry. Businesses are no longer tied to large machines that take up entire floors. Many businesses no longer use desktop computers. Mobile technology (in the form of laptops, tablets, smartphones and even wearables) has changed the game for many businesses, particularly when it comes to communications and workflow.

To better serve modern business, it’s time to revise the BANT mindset. The traditional concern about cost (Budget) is now a moot point for many businesses because the subscription or monthly fee-for-services model has significantly lowered sales resistance compared to when IBM first developed the BANT paradigm. Companies no longer have to make large capital investments in equipment to purchase up-to-date computing services. Price is no longer a barrier to purchasing software or platform products and services. Cost as a marketing qualified lead criteria is significantly less important than it was 60 years ago.

The smartest sales approach for SaaS or PaaS products and services is to flip the BANT approach on its head so that what used to come first (Budget) is now last, and what was last (Time Frame) is now first when assessing a sales qualified lead. The sales approach is now TNAB – Time Frame, Need, Authority and Budget.

In the past, time frame was primarily a concern after the sale was made. Even IBM recognized they only had to meet the first three criteria (budget, need, and authority) to make a sale. Time frame was a deal breaker only if the supplier couldn’t deliver the product or service on the customer’s timetable. But today, time frame is the most important lead qualifier; for SaaS companies, the strongest compelling reason to purchase is the ability to deliver the SaaS product to the customer immediately. If a customer isn’t wowed by that, they probably aren’t ready to buy.

Today, a market qualified lead means the customer is comfortable with the idea that a SaaS solution is immediately available to them, and that they won’t have to push their purchase decision into the future. The next hurdle to overcome for qualified lead generation is to start asking questions to determine the appropriate product or service that will meet the customer’s needs. BANT qualified leads don’t yield the sales results they did in the past. Placing the customer’s needs third, after ‘is there enough money’ and ‘who has authority to purchase’, has wasted time as salespeople chase customers who are not ‘qualified’ to purchase their products.

One key to successful sales is to realize that not all qualified sales leads will be a good fit for every company. If a business doesn’t need a product or service, a lower price, bigger discount, or more incentives will not entice them to buy. Chasing after leads that would be better served by a competitor’s product is a waste of time for salespeople. Time frame and Needs assessment can be accomplished in one sales call using the TNAB approach, because if the customers’ needs aren’t compatible with the company’s product or service offerings, trying to sell to them will not result in a transaction.

The other consideration with SaaS solutions is that some sales are done with no interactions with the salespeople. More and more sales are being done online. To these customers, price is secondary to their need profile; needs determination becomes the single most important thing to that customer. If the information they need is not packaged and explained well, the customer won’t be able to see how the product or service could solve their business need. These customers are already at a point of being uncomfortable with their current situation and are actively seeking solutions. Jacco van der Kooij of Sales Hacker says, “In SaaS, decisions are based on priority, not on budget.” To remove the first purchase hurdle (Time Frame) for these customers, put immediate access to the SaaS solution up front in web page content.

Once both Time Frame and Need criteria are met, most of the hard work is done. After that, it’s an administrative issue to get approval from the right people and get the money for the purchase.

Lead qualification doesn’t have to be a battle between marketing and sales teams. By flipping the BANT approach where it first considers the customer’s urgency (Time) for the product or service, and then how the company meets their needs (Need), SaaS and PaaS salespeople can spend more time selling and less time being frustrated with leads that go nowhere. A ‘backwards’ approach to BANT makes more sense than qualifying on an ability to pay and who will sign the purchase order. Ultimately, shouldn’t meeting the customer’s needs be first priority for every business?

If you need to create 4 opportunities a month, each one worth $75,000, to be able to make your number.  If you don’t create those opportunities, you need 8 opportunities the next month. If you do better work the next month and put up two new opportunities worth $75,000 each, you are now carrying forward 6 opportunities into the very next month—in addition to the 4 you need to create to cover the month you’re in.

Math doesn’t care if you don’t really like prospecting, the creation of new opportunities. It doesn’t care if you don’t believe that you should have to cold call, nor does it care that marketing didn’t give you the leads you believe you need. Math does what it does.

Math also doesn’t care if you are lazy. It doesn’t care that you aren’t willing to exercise the self-discipline necessary to manage yourself. Nor is it concerned that you like to be entertained, and that you love the novelty provided by the small screen of infinite distractions. Math works even if you don’t.

Math doesn’t care that you had every intention of doing good work, and that you really need to do well in your role. It isn’t even aware that you have any feelings whatsoever, good, bad, or indifferent. Math certainly doesn’t have any feelings.

It doesn’t care about your manager, the President, your irrational competitor, your equally irrational prospective client, your product challenges, or the fact that the Internet is disintermediating your industry. Math just goes right on being math, neutral in all issues, punishing some and rewarding others.

If it is difficult to create 4 opportunities in a month, then it isn’t any easier to create 10 in that same number of days.

The post Math Doesn’t Care appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In B2B, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a topic as widely-loathed as sales and marketing alignment.

For all the content dedicated to the subject, sales-marketing alignment remains a pie-in-the-sky industry concept to most B2B sales leaders.

That’s partly because you can’t find many success stories that drill down into the strategy and practices of successful campaigns.

Next week’s free virtual summit, Aligned 2017, sets forth to rectify that. Cohosted by Sales Hacker, Engagio, Ambition, HubSpot, and more, the five-day event gives registrants on-demand access to 50+ brand-new video sessions with experts, consultants, and operators talking all things B2B sales-marketing alignment.

5 Sales-Marketing Alignment Success Stories for B2B

What does a successful B2B sales-marketing alignment strategy look like? How are B2B sales leaders implementing those strategies? What tools and tactics are they using?

Aligned 2017 has the full answers. But as a special preview, I’m chronicling five of my favorite sessions from next week’s summit.

From $250K ARR to $11M

The most remarkable thing about Drew Woodcock -- the first and only sales leader for online restaurant ordering platform ChowNow -- is his prior sales management experience. Or lack thereof, we should say. Drew Woodcock joined ChowNow as an Account Executive in May 2013.

In November 2013, ChowNow’s leadership tapped him to become the first sales leader in company history. Sales team headcount at that time? 7 reps. Annual recurring revenue? $250K.

Fast forward three and a half years, and ChowNow has more than 40 reps and $11M in ARR.

How did Drew get ChowNow where it is today -- with zero foundation to build on and zero prior experience to draw from? Simple. He started aligning ChowNow’s sales organization by revamping incentives. As the company scaled, he kept teams accountable to goals by tracking, publicizing, and rewarding key activity and efficiency metrics. Most critically, he created a culture of camaraderie, teamwork, and professional development that transcends his sales, marketing, support and account management teams. At Aligned, Drew will cover the key tools and playbooks he leveraged to drive ChowNow’s success.

Register for Aligned 2017. Submit a question for Drew Woodcock.

From $0 to $10M in Revenue

Michael Pici led the sales team charged with launching HubSpot’s nascent sales platform back in 2014. After taking the product from $0 to $10M in revenue generated, Michael now leads a team of 80 salespeople and managers.

He attributes HubSpot’s revenue growth to internal alignment across its product, marketing, sales, and service teams. That includes deploying MSPOTs (Mission, Strategy, Playbook, Omissions, Tracking), running audits on failed initiatives, communicating with leadership across functions, and, perhaps most critically, committing to constant, company-wide client communication.

If that’s too high-level for you, start by stealing this strategy from the HubSpot leadership team. Bring together the heads of product, marketing, sales, and services for your organization. Jump on a conference call with a major existing client, allowing each member of the leadership team to ask questions and get insights specific to their function within your company.

Use that as a springboard for an internal discussion about improving alignment and coordination across each of your departments. Congratulations, you’re using a tried-and-true HubSpot alignment philosophy in your organization.

Register for Aligned 2017. Submit a question for Michael Pici.

From 3 Reps to 30

Ask Prezi sales operations lead Adam Harless, and he’ll assure you industry and company size don’t impact the core principles behind successful B2B sales and marketing operations. Adam should know -- 18 months ago, he went from leading sales operations for enterprise 3PL Echo Global Logistics to the same role at Prezi, a high-growth SaaS startup.

Worlds apart? Not so much. Adam says the same alignment principles apply, whether you’re running sales operations for 700 brokers working in a high-volume call center or an agile, inbound-driven SaaS startup.

Adam’s principles:

1. Streamline processes
2. Adopt user-friendly technology
3. Focus on key metrics

Following those principles has proven fruitful for both Adam and the B2B sales team at Prezi -- which grew from three to 10 reps in 2016 and is expected to reach 30 reps this year.

Register for Aligned 2017. Submit a question for Adam Harless.

From Desegmentation to Hybridization

Outsourcing sales development to another organization -- especially one with the specific characteristics of Inside Sales Team -- is still a relatively novel concept for most B2B sales organizations. And yet, Inside Sales Team president and general manager Marijke Kemble has successfully grown both sales and support team headcount since taking over their internal business operations last June.

How did she do it? By going completely against the grain in how she structures IST’s sales organization. While most B2B sales organizations are segmenting their various sales functions into unique, hyper-specific roles, Kemble implemented the opposite strategy. Not only did she de-segment IST’s sales team, she hybridized various marketing, business development, closing, and account management functions into a single role.

The broader and deeper an Inside Sales Team member’s understanding of the entire B2B front office, the better they would understand and serve IST’s clients. It’s proof that there are a million unique ways to successfully align your B2B sales organization.

Register for Aligned 2017. Submit a question for Marijke Kemble.

600% Revenue Growth

Since Morgan Ingram joined Terminus in 2015, he’s implemented a truly hybrid strategy that has bridged the gap between marketing and sales: The SDR Chronicles YouTube channel.

This is a prime example of successful sales-marketing alignment. It speaks to the right audience and offers value rather than selling.

The channel has had an impact both for Morgan, who was promoted to sales development manager, and Terminus, which achieved 600% revenue growth and 300% client growth since May 2016.

 Register for Aligned 2017. Submit a question for Morgan Ingram.

Register for Aligned 2017

These five success stories are just the beginning. Aligned 2017 offers a week’s worth of video content for modern B2B sales leaders, including keynotes from Gary Vaynerchuk, Jill Konrath, Tony Hughes, and more.

Whether you’re adopting an account based approach, looking to ramp inbound lead generation, or trying to smooth the handoffs down the marketing and sales funnel, you need a playbook that matches the needs of your organization.

Register now to get free access to all 50 video sessions starting Monday, May 22.

Getting customers for your clients is something you’re good at. Consistently acquiring clients yourself can be challenging when you are focused on client work, not to mention you don’t have your sales process steps defined.

You may have noticed that businesses in your funnel seem to dance around and it looks like leads aren’t going in a very clear pattern.

It’s because they’re not.

No, the problem isn’t (necessarily) your content or the leads.

Nowadays, people like to simmer on things for a while. Go back and forth, download several resources, and move around until they are extremely comfortable.

But that doesn’t help your marketing agency grow.

To get around this issue, you have to provoke leads in your pipeline down the path toward sales—starting from the very beginning with clearly defined sales process steps.

We’re going to go over these sales process steps in four different stages:

1. Connect: Finding the right leads and getting them to respond.
2. Qualify: Making sure they’re in the right place and the right time.
3. Close: Getting them to say yes to your stuff.
4. Deliver: Having a process to continue the relationship.

Sales Process Step 1: Connect

Connecting is all about getting the right people who either don’t know you at all or know you a little bit to speak with you (or a rep).

There are two ways to do this—prospect cold leads (outbound and/or inbound).

I know it seems like we’re biased, but we really do love both. Our specialty is helping people warm up cold leads via email, but we also publish a ton of long-form content, resources, and have some decent-sized inbound-esque plans for the future.

Try not to judge a company by its logo

Too many people are either one or the other. But the growth that can be achieved through a combined strategy is mind-boggling.

So, if you’re all inbound and haven’t considered outbound—it could be why you want to read this post.

That said, we are going to be concentrating on outbound sales.

Connecting starts with you, not picking up the phone. We’re not firmly in the “cold calling isn’t dead” side of that battle, but you have to define it right for it to work. There are plenty of ways to generate leads without cold calling .

Inbound usually attracts via resources, blogs, etc. Then, reps look at personas to make sure they are a good fit. Outbound starts with the ideal buyer in mind before your leads even know you’re coming.

Targeting the leads you’d like to become clients can dramatically hone your marketing resources while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle.

We’ve written a post about this here, but here are the quick tips for picking your favorite leads:

• Look at Your (current) Clients: Before you send your first ever cold email, you’ll need an idea of who you’re going after. The best way to find them is by looking at your current client roster. Who’s your favorite type of account? Why? What do they all have in common (e.g. revenue, number of employees, industry)? Use that to develop a target lead.
• Develop Your Pitch: You can’t just ask them if they wanna buy your stuff. It’s more of a matter of selling what they want to achieve and then establishing yourself as the service or agency that can bring in those results. That’s going to take a little content marketing (e.g. white paper, webinar, other resource). Send them something that’s valuable and they’ll be more likely to reciprocate.
• Automate the Process: Believe it or not, your entire cold outreach strategy can be automated. From finding the leads that fit your prospect profile to sending out multiple emails to those leads and even stopping the sequence when a lead responds to an email. It can all be low-touch, allowing you to concentrate on gaining and servicing the account.

What You’re After: The connect stage transitions into the next when a lead actually responds to your outreach efforts. Meaning they email you back or answer the phone. They’ll move to qualifying or just tell you to leave them alone—either way is better fine.

Sales Process Step 2: Qualify

Qualifying the leads in your pipeline means something completely different in outbound lead gen.

Inbound (usually) qualifies the lead based on buyer profiles and leads interact with the brand (e.g. content engagement, call-to-actions, etc.) Outbound goes from unaware to connecting (getting a response from your outreach) as fast as possible.

Once you connect with a lead, you want to see if they’re a fit for your services (a.k.a. qualify them) which will usually take place via phone call.

There are questions that need to be answered before you try to close. And you find out the answers to those by asking leads some questions that extract the data you need before you try to close.

We have a post for this, too (if you want to check it out) but we’ll go over the basics of what you need to find out.

• Make Sure the Pain’s There: Some of your questions have to be if the pain is significant to the contact that makes the decisions. For instance, if you’re selling review management to restaurants, the owner has to hate their Yelp! reviews. If they’re happy with their reputation, it’s not going to work out in your favor.
• Make Sure the Motivation is There: Ask things about how satisfied they are with current providers. Or, you could make it about their growth and see how hungry they are for better marketing.
• Make Sure the Time is Right: Talking turkey needs to happen before a sales call. Here, you want to find out how much they’re currently wasting spending on their marketing. Most companies in the right revenue range (not too small or big) have a big ad spend, but aren’t getting any metrics to track results—making them an easier sell.

What You’re After: Once a lead is qualified, you want to schedule a call to lay out your marketing strategy that is a bit more tailored to this lead (not that you know them a bit better). Don’t sell on this call. Get them excited to hear about the results they can achieve.

Sales Process Step 3: Close

Hopefully, you’re on a call with a genuine prospect that has quickly went from unaware lead to ready to buy.

If that’s the case, you’re ready to paint a picture of the results and the process that you will use to bring them about.

This is when you’re going to fight the battle of objections. This is when you’ll ask for their business.

• Sell Results, Not Services: You’re not trying to tell leads about how awesome you are at PPC. But you are trying to tell them exactly how you’ll increase their results (and using PPC may be a big part of that, but it’s not what they’re buying).
• Overcome Objections: Better knowing the leads you’re going to reach out to is going to help you understand the specific objections of both the specific industry and role you’re dealing with. It’s like having a cheat sheet for the test.
• Ask for the Deal: Once you’ve gotten any hangups, it’s time to ask if they want the results you know you can provide. It’s actually a good idea to ask leads to give you a definitive yes or no at the end of the call before you even start your presentation (e.g. Once I give you the strategy for your business, will you give me a straight answer?).

What You’re After: I think you know the answer to this one. You’re after the sale, but you’ll likely still get a maybe from more than a few leads. Don’t give up on them completely. Set a note to reach out again in 3-6 months.

“The customer doesn’t care about features – they care about solving their problems.” — Trish Bertuzzi

Sales Process Step 4: Deliver

Once you have the sale, the work begins. You start delivering on what you promised is what you do.

That said, there are several things that could help or improve the mood of your new clients even more. You want their business for as long as possible, but there’s more to it than just giving them what they ordered.

At a minimum, you should be doing this to get referrals:

• Communicate Via Drip: Agencies do a lot of stuff. Many of the services you provide may not be included in your original offer to clients, but they could still use them. Send them a steady stream of emails that offer value and talk about some of the other things you do.
• Ask for a Referral: When the relationship is new and your clients start seeing the results is a great time to ask for a referral. The post above is almost entirely about setting up a program that will give you a steady flow of new business.
• Do a Good Job: You can sell, talk, and ask without performing. It’s always a good idea to ask yourself honestly whether or not you’re doing a good job for your clients. Call them up and ask them after a little while. Set up metrics to prove to yourself and accounts that things are moving forward.

What You’re After: Delivering a good result is about doing the right thing and getting the most out of each account. The goal is to increase the lifetime value of clients and get referrals—all of which help you grow.

Getting It Done

One of the coolest things about this process is that it can be added to the way you get clients already. Running ads, traffic and any other methods don’t have to be stopped to give this process a shot.

Do you use any of these sales process steps for your business? We’d love to hear about how you are gaining clients.

As an Eagle Scout I can discuss the topic of “Be Prepared” easily and based upon my upcoming vacation next week it could lend more credibility. Last year I had to catch two planes and a ferry to end up on an island in the Caribbean, while that sounds somewhat easy, it took planning and preparation. Taking a vacation for me becomes a big project for a variety of reasons-but mainly it’s time to unplug and “breathe fresh air”.

We researched a wide variety of destinations, resorts and optional packages, we narrowed the search and checked out online evaluations and then compared costs. I posted potential locations and asked for opinions on Facebook, I asked my travel agent for her thoughts and friends for their experiences. All of this helped us pick a great spot, it was rated the “best beach resort in the world”.

Next I had to organize my professional life. Client projects needed to be finalized, meetings re-scheduled, mobile phones had to find International plans, and new proposals completed.

Now just a few day to go, we had to pack, purchase last minute items and think through options like umbrellas, sun tan lotion, books, mosquito spray and other health related item.

What does this have to do with sales management? As a manager you must be prepared-at all times for almost any event. The best plan is to have a plan and to consider what might go wrong or what could impact your ability to exceed your objectives. I have simply listed below a series of topics for your consideration and for you to double check against your plan or lack of plan.

Do you have a plan?

 If you lose a salesperson

 If your sales team needs sales training

 To increase the sales culture of your team

 To increase your networking/partnering function

 That generates excitement for your products/services

 To say thank you to your support team

 That increases your level of professionalism/education

 To create a sales contest that drives revenue

 That adds net new customers to your base

 That drives the necessary sales leads for each month

 To say thank you to your existing customer base

 To increase your public relations exposure within your community or market

 That will increase/improve your vendor relations

 To improve your CRM effectiveness

 If your computer systems fail or are destroyed

That’s enough for now, but if I missed anything, comment below, let’s build a complete list for the future.

HINT: this is a great idea for your next management meeting, simply begin by asking each of the departmental managers about their problems or contingency issues that arise on a day to day basis or what might occur if a disaster of any kind happens-then ask them for their plan.

Why is this critically important today? In any kind of business environment, the organization that operates the most efficiently generally out performs their competition, in more challenging times a focus on efficient effectiveness must become the mantra for the day.

Feel like you’re drowning in email? Like it’s a never-ending issue too? Most of us are—yet we have to keep checking because it’s our primary way to communicate with our prospects and customers.

For all you know:

• Your dream client is no longer in love with their long time provider. In fact, they moved on 6 months ago, and they are still not happy. Right now, they are getting ready to look for a new provider.
• That prospect that never used a product or service like you has had a change of circumstances, making what you sell something they now need. They’re not sure where to look to find help, and they are searching for someone with answers.
• That past client company that left you three years ago has had complete turnover in their management team, and no one there has any memory of your company, positive or negative. They’re not married to anyone, and they are open to new ideas.
• That lead that doesn’t look like much and clearly hasn’t been qualified is a multi-million dollar user who happened upon your company when they were referred by a friend. They reached out to engage with someone, but they are moving on because no one followed up.
• That price conscious prospect who you could never do business with now perceives what you sell as something strategic. After being disappointed by three of your competitors in a row, they are now sufficiently disabused of the idea that they can have what they need and the lowest price.
• Your irrational competitor is strapped for cash and struggling to stay afloat. While you are perceiving them as a threat because they sell on price alone, they are close to the brink of disaster and suffering from serious quality issues.
• That dream client who doesn’t answer your emails does in fact answer their telephone. Your competitor just booked an appointment because she had the audacity to dial and was pitch perfect in her approach. She’s going to be sitting with the decision-makers next week in a face-to-face meeting because she is willing to do what others are not.
• Your dream client took your pricing and proposal and met with their team, but they didn’t have the answers to the questions that surfaced in that meeting. Since no one was there to help them with good counsel, they decided to punt the initiative into next year.

For all you know, you never really know unless you do the work to discover what is true right now.

The post For All You Know appeared first on The Sales Blog.

For the past several decades we’ve been teaching computers to understand the visual world. And like everything artificial intelligence these days, computer vision is making rapid strides. So much so that it’s starting to beat us at ‘name that object.’

Every year the ImageNet project runs a competition testing the current capability of computers to identify objects in photographs. And in 2015, they hit a milestone…

Microsoft reported a 4.94% error rate for their vision system, compared to a 5.1% human counterpart.

While that doesn’t quite give computers the ability to do everything that human vision can (yet), it does mean that computer vision is ready for prime time. In fact, computer vision is very good — and lightning fast — at narrow tasks. Tasks like:

• Social listening: Track buzz about your brand and products in images posted to social media
• Visual auditing: Remotely monitor for damage, defects or regulatory compliance in a fleet of trucks, planes, or windmills
• Insurance: Quickly process claims by instantly classifying new submissions into different categories
• Manufacturing: Ensure components are being positioned correctly on an assembly line
• Social commerce: Use an image of a food dish to find out which restaurant serves it, or use a travel photo to find vacation suggestions based on similar experiences, or find similar homes for sale
• Retail: Find stores with similar clothes in stock or on sale, or use a travel image to find retail suggestions in that area

This is a game-changer for business. An A.I.-powered tool that can digitize the visual world can add value to a wide range of business processes — from marketing to security to fleet management.

Unlocking Data in Visual Content

So here’s a step-by-step guide for building a powerful image recognition service — powered by IBM Watson — and capable of facial recognition, age estimation, object identification, etc.

The application wrapped around this service (originally developed by IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud) is preconfigured to identify objects, faces, text, scenes and other contexts in images.

A quick example.

And by the way…Here’s what Watson found in our featured image above:

Classes Score guitarist 0.69 musician 0.77 entertainer 0.77 person 0.86 songwriter 0.61 bass (musical instrument) 0.53 musical instrument 0.54 device 0.54 orange color 0.95 Type Hierarchy /person/entertainer/musician/guitarist /person/songwriter /device/bass (musical instrument)

Faces Score age 18 – 24 0.50 male 0.02

Not too shabby. Watson correctly identified the image as a person with a guitar. It also found the face, which is pretty impressive. But was unsure about the guitarist’s age and gender.

Personally, I would guess our guitarist is a woman based on the longer hair and fingernails. And no doubt Watson will be able to pick up those subtle clues as well in the near future.

Note: The “Score” is a numerical representation (0-1) of how confident the system is in a particular classification. The higher the number, the higher the confidence.

A.I.-Powered Vision

Using an artificial intelligence platform to instantly translate the things we see into written common language, is like having an army of experts continuously reviewing and describing your images.

Allowing you to quickly — and accurately — organize visual information. Turning piles of images — or video frames — into useful data for your business. Data that can then be acted upon, shared or stored.

What will you learn from your visual data?

Let’s find out…

• What You’ll Need
• Step 1: Create the Application Container
• Step 2: Create the Visual Recognition Instance
• Step 3: Launch It
• Troubleshooting

If you’d like to preview the source code, here’s our fork of the application on GitHub.

The End Result

The steps in this guide will create an application similar to the following…

You can also preview a live version of this application. The major features are:

• Object determination — Classifies things in the image
• Text extraction — Extracts text displayed in the image
• Face detection — Detects human faces, including an estimation of age & gender
• Celebrity identifier — Names the person if your image includes a public figure (when a face is found)

And this is just the beginning, this application can be extended in many different ways — it’s only limited by your imagination.

How it works.

Here’s a quick diagram of the major components…

The application uses just one cloud-based service from IBM Watson:

• Visual Recognition — Classifies objects and scenes in image data

Note: Most of the following steps can be accomplished through command line or point-and-click. To keep it as visual as possible, this guide focuses on point-and-click. But the source code also includes command line scripts if that’s your preference.

What You’ll Need

Before we create the service instance and application container, let’s get the system requirements knocked.

Download the source repository.

To start, go ahead and download the source files.

Note: You’ll need a git client installed on your computer for this step.

Simply move to the directory you want to use for this demo and run the following commands in a terminal…

Terminal

# Download source repository
git clone https://github.com/10xNation/ibm-watson-visual-recognition.git
cd ibm-watson-visual-recognition

At this point, you can keep the terminal window open and set it aside for now…we’ll need it in a later step.

Name the application.

Right away, let’s nail down a name for your new image recognition app.

manifest.yml

...
  # Application name
- name: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
...

Replace xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx in the manifest.yml file with a globally unique name for your instance of the application.

The name you choose will be used to create the application’s URL — eg. http://visual-recognition-12345.mybluemix.net/.

Create a Bluemix account.

Go to the Bluemix Dashboard page (Bluemix is IBM’s cloud platform).

If you don’t already have one, create a Bluemix account by clicking on the “Sign Up” button and completing the registration process.

Install Cloud-foundry.

A few of the steps in this guide require a command line session, so you’ll need to install the Cloud-foundry CLI tool. This toolkit allows you more easily interact with Bluemix.

Open a terminal session with Bluemix.

Once the Cloud-foundry CLI tool is installed, you’ll be able to log into Bluemix through the terminal.

Terminal

# Log into Bluemix
cf api https://api.ng.bluemix.net
cf login -u YOUR_BLUEMIX_ID -p YOUR_BLUEMIX_PASSOWRD

Replace YOUR_BLUEMIX_ID and YOUR_BLUEMIX_PASSOWRD with the respective username and password you created above.

Step 1: Create the Application Container

Go to the Bluemix Dashboard page.

Then on the next page, click on the “Create App” button to add a new application.

In this demo, we’ll be using a Node application, so click on “SDK for Node.js.”

Then fill out the information required, using the application name you chose in What You’ll Need — and hit “Create.”

Set the application memory.

Before we move on, let’s give the application a little more memory to work with.

Click on your application.

Then click on the “plus” sign for “MB MEMORY PER INSTANCE” — set it to 512 MB — and hit “Save.”

Step 2: Create the Visual Recognition Instance

To set up your Visual Recognition service, jump back to the Bluemix Dashboard page.

Click on your application again.

And that should take you to the Overview tab for your application. And since this is a brand new application, you should see a “Create new” button in the Connections widget — click that button.

You should now see a long list of services. Click “Watson” in the Categories filter and then click on “Visual Recognition” to create an instance of that service.

Go ahead and choose a Service Name that makes sense for you — eg. Visual Recognition-Demo. For this demo, the “Free” Pricing Plan will do just fine. And by default, you should see your application’s name listed in the “Connected to” field.

Click the “Create” button when ready. And enter the Name and Pricing Plan you chose into the manifest.yml file…

manifest.yml

...
  # Visual Recognition
  Visual Recognition-Demo:
    label: watson_vision_combined
    plan: free
...
- services:
   - Visual Recognition-Demo
...

If needed, replace both instances of Visual Recognition-Demo with your Service Name and free with your chosen Pricing Plan.

Feel free to “Restage” your application when prompted.

Enter service credentials.

After your Visual Recognition instance is created, click on the respective “View credentials” button.

And that will pop up a modal with your details.

Copy/paste your API key into the respective portion of your .env file.

.env

# Environment variables
VISUAL_RECOGNITION_API_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Replace xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with the key listed for api_key.

Your Visual Recognition service is now ready. So let’s fire this thing up!

Step 3: Launch It

To bring the application to life, simply run the following command — making sure the terminal is still in the repository directory and logged into Bluemix…

Terminal

cf push

This command will upload all the needed files, configure the settings — and start the application.

Note: You can use the same cf push command to update the same application after it’s originally published.

Take a look.

After the application has started, you’ll be able to open it in your browser at the respective URL.

The page should look something like this…

Play around with it and get a feel for the functionality.

Custom classifier.

The application also supports a custom classifier, which allows you to customize the type of objects the system can identify within your images.

To check it out, click on the “Train” button.

The “Free” pricing plan only supports one custom classifier. So if you want to test multiple versions, you’ll need to delete the previous one. And you can do that by deleting and recreating the Visual Recognition service — step #2 above. Or you can modify the existing service using the following command…

Note: You’ll need the curl command installed for this.

Terminal

# Get classifier ID
curl -X GET "https://gateway-a.watsonplatform.net/visual-recognition/api/v3/classifiers/?api_key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&version=2017-05-06"
# Remove existing custom classifier
curl -X DELETE "https://gateway-a.watsonplatform.net/visual-recognition/api/v3/classifiers/xxxxxxxxxxxx?api_key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&version=2017-05-06"

Replace 2017-05-06 with the date you created the classifier, xxxxxxxxxxxx with the classifier_id returned from the first command, and both instances of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Visual Recognition service api key you retrieved in step #2

Troubleshooting

If you’re having any problems with the application, be sure to check out the logs…

Just click on the “Logs” tab within your application page.

And that’s pretty much the end of the road. You’re now a computer vision pro!

Take it to the Next Level

Feel like you’re ready to give your applications and devices the power of sight? The sky’s the limit for how and where you apply this technology.

And under the current pricing, you can classify 250 images/day for free. So there’s no reason not to jump right in.

You can dig deeper into the Visual Recognition service at the Watson Developer documentation.
Enjoy!

At Growbots, we came across the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework more by accident than on purpose. Despite that, it has become, in our eyes, the best and most actionable way we have found to define our customers. Our need to do so started back when we were a lead generation agency. We had developed a targeting document through trials and errors. This had worked for a bit but then we ran into a wall.

1. There were not many prospects left who met our targeting criteria.
2. The value of the clients was static, we couldn’t make bigger deals.
3. We couldn’t jack up our conversion rate above 7%.

In order to keep generating leads, we needed to find a new way of targeting prospects.

And this is when we had an epiphany. We had been targeting all wrong and been leaving money on the table as a result. You see, when we used to think about targeting, we were looking for the customers who we had been able to sell to in the past. We had then tried to find customers who had similar characteristics, be it operating in the same vertical, from the same region, or with the same number of employees. We assumed that similar companies to those that already became our customers would have similar needs and make similar decisions: specifically, they would buy our product.

What we completely missed is that two people in radically different companies can face the same problem and they can solve it in the same way with the same outcome. Rather than focus on similar kinds of customers, we started focusing on similar kinds of solutions. And that is where Jobs to be Done comes in.

With Jobs to be Done, we can describe the exact situation when our customer needs us

After all, a customer doesn’t need our product because of the kind of company they are. They need our product because they reached a pain point that they need to deal with.

Jobs to be Done helps you understand who you can help most and how to be appealing to them. You can use JTBD to:

• Identify the situation where your solution helps the most
• Predict the outcome that your customers want to get from using it
• Predict which customers are in a situation that you can help them with
• Convince your customers that you are the best solution to solve their problem

These are all the things that you need to do to be successful at outbound sales. In fact, you can use Jobs to be Done to improve your outbound results in just three steps.

Step 1: Find out what job your customers hire your product to do
Step 2: Turn your research into a job story
Step 3: Use your job story to create targeting documents essential to outbound sales:

• ICP for targeting your prospects
• Buyer persona to personalize the messages you send

Step 1: Find out what job your customers hire your product to do

Your customer “hires” your product to solve a problem that they have. This is best explained by the Milkshake story that Clayton Christensen, one of the originators of the Jobs to be Done framework, famously gave. It is up to you to find out what jobs your product does for your customers.

Don’t expect these jobs to be obvious or what you intended them to be. Intercom famously designed a map to show where people were engaging with their customers from. It turned out that what was supposed to be a cool throwaway feature was being used very seriously to show off the global breadth of the companies who used it.

The question then becomes: how “Can I find the information I need to find out about jobs to be done?” The Innovator’s ToolKit provides a great framework which can be adapted to B2B outbound:

1. Look at your current customers
2. Define your competition and find out what jobs their customers need to be done
3. Define the customers you want and analyze the jobs they need done
4. Talk to everybody who has contact with the customers
5. Conduct interviews to find specific JTBD
   1. You can use these basic questions from the American express institute but if you want to go deeper, you can check out this set of interview questions tailored for SaaS products

Step 2: turn your research into a job story

A job story is the simplest way to express your job to be done. It can be expressed by this simple format:

• “When…”
  • Describes situation where the customer needs your product
• “I want to…”
  • Describes the action your customer wants to take
• “So I can…”
  • Describes the outcome your customer wants

Example:

When I need to furnish my office, I want to be able to move workstations easily, so I can change the arrangement of the office whenever I need to.

Step 3: Use your job story to create targeting documents essential to outbound sales

• Build an ideal customer profile or ICP for targeting your prospects

  An ICP is a representation of the kind of customer you want to sell to or as Steli Efti says, “It’s basically a description of a fictitious organization (company, government agency, non-profit organization …) which gets significant value from using your product/service, and also provides significant value to your company.”

  Your ICP is important for outbound because it gives you the criteria which can be easily imputed into prospecting applications. Essentially, you create a super targeted market segment. This is important as market segments have a long history of getting results. As Wendell R. Smith wrote, “Success in planning marketing activities requires precise utilization of […] market segmentation as components of marketing strategy.”

  In other words, you only have a limited number of resources with which you can attract customers, so spend them on the customers who will give you the most back for your efforts.

  The criteria you use is specific to your job story, not a particular set of criteria that everyone must follow. That being said, these frameworks can provide you with criteria that you can use: our ICP framework, Setli’s ICP framework, and the one created by Lincoln Murphy. You can mix and match the criteria depending on what is important for defining your customer.

  The most important thing is to focus on the situation (the “when”) of your job story. When you do this, find which criteria match companies that get into the situation that you solve. The prospects you find do not represent all of the people you can sell to, just ones you know you can successfully target.

• Define a buyer persona to personalize the messages you send then

  Your buyer persona is a list of specific pain points and motivations of the person you write your message to, along with the jobs that you do for them. It still serves a role in messaging but should be informed by your job story. As Intercom’s Matt Hodges, a major proponent of applying Jobs to be Done to lead generation, says, “You are going to have different personas that are going to hire your product for a job, but they’re going to talk about it in a different way.”

  

  After all, a CEO and a specialist might have different pain points and jobs that they need to be done. In fact, you can use the information from your job story and job story research to build your buyer persona. To do this, find out what kind of person fits the pain point, solution, and outcome. Like with your ICP, you can include whichever criteria are important for messaging.

Your targeting documents will be useful for all of your lead generation channels. To help you decide which one to develop, check out our post about which channel is best for your business.

Image attribution

Great salespeople do more than just consistently drive profitable revenue for their employers. They inspire confidence in customers and partners, increase brand trust, and contribute to a positive company culture. And, these salespeople are rare, representing only 10 to 15 percent of the sales population. If you want to accurately identify these top salespeople in an interview

Read More

The post 5 Ways Top Performing Salespeople Are Different From the Rest [Video] appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt of OpenView’s PLG Playbook. Sign up to receive additional chapters as they are released here.

The goal of every product-led business should be to get the product in the hands of the user as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. By removing any barriers in the way of initial usage, you’re giving users the chance to truly experience your product free from marketing, sales or any other disruptions.

But doing so means you’ll have to offer something of initial value for free. This could certainly come in the form of a freemium edition, as is the case with Trello, Slack, Expensify, Evernote, UberConference, Drift and countless other products.

The Freemium Approach

Freemium works particularly well for companies operating in markets with millions of potential users, when there’s virality and network effects built into the product, or when you have the capital to worry about monetization later.

In the case of Expensify, a travel and expense app, a freemium offering enables the company to appeal to end users who are sick and tired of outdated expense reports. They want to make it as simple as possible for these users to find and use the product. Monetization happens later, with features that appeal to accounting teams who need more sophistication and customization. As Jason Mills, Director of Sales and Success at Expensify puts it,

“A lot of people find us organically because we’re really serving a need and a pain point they already have. We just happen to be very highly rated, easy to find and have a great business model, because it’s free to sign up and [someone can] use the product without having to necessarily make a buying decision.”

With Drift, a sales communication platform, they’ve recognized that the virality built into their free product serves essentially as free advertising for the business. As CEO David Cancel explains,

“Another reason to go free is because we want to get on as many business websites as possible. We’re willing to play along. But every one of those business websites is free advertising and a referral back to Drift, so why wouldn’t we?”

But contrary to popular belief, a freemium model isn’t a necessary component of product-led growth. Conversion rates on freemium plans are notoriously low, typically hovering between 3 and 5%, and can attract users who aren’t in your target market. Moreover, if you make the free offering too good, you could end up competing against yourself in a deal. As Craig Walker, Founder and CEO at DialPad notes,

“We made our free service almost too good so we have a lot of very dedicated, very happy free users, and sometimes we have a hard time upselling them because they’re like, “Hey, why would I need anything else?” Our stiffest competition is coming from ourselves!”

The Free Trial

An alternative to a freemium offering is a free trial that doesn’t require the user to enter credit card information in order to sign up. This method is employed by companies like Datadog and Deputy. Alternatively, you might offer a free feature that ties back to the value of your core product offering as HubSpot did with Website Grader.

Yoav Shapira, who served as VP of Engineering at HubSpot during their hyper-growth years, describes how this worked and why it was a good way to quickly prove value to users,

“Trials are good to do, but trials are often too long. At HubSpot we had a tool called Website Grader… Its entire existence was about creating time to value. It’s free. You put in a URL – your site or your competitor’s – and we analyze the site using our marketing methodology.”

Join.me, the online meeting software provider, took a different approach. Initially, new Join.me users would start with a 14-day free trial of their premium product. After the 14 days, a user could either pay up to keep using the upgraded model or let their trial lapse and be kicked down to the basic version of Join.me. This strategy enabled the company to capture individual users who hadn’t been granted licenses to costlier products. Join.me’s VP of eCommerce at the time, Eric Bisceglia, explains,

“The perpetually free model in the early days actually fueled very, very massive adoption because there was nothing good in the market that was doing that…It got to the point where in a few years, we had millions of new users each week.”

Over time, Join.me’s rapid growth signaled to the company that a freemium product might no longer be necessary to sustain growth. Instead, they discovered a better way to monetize their users. Bisceglia notes,

“The decision was made to end-of-life the free product, move solely to a 14-day free trial, and if you don’t buy, you get nothing, and you have to pay to continue. It actually turned out that there was a huge opportunity to monetize that base by turning off that fully free product and going just purely to a free trial model.”

Monetizing Your User Base

Now that you’ve got your product in the hands of as many users as possible, and they’ve fallen in love, it’s time to monetize that value you’ve created for your users. Successful product-led businesses set up scalable monetization models that make it easy to land-and-expand their customer base.

PLG companies land paying customers by being strategic about the features they place in paid plans and when they attempt to convert free users into paying customers. But they don’t stop there. PLG companies then use value metrics and different product tiers to increase ARPU.

Dropbox, for instance, takes a very data-driven approach to identifying what features they can monetize to upsell existing users and strike the right balance between user happiness and monetization. They do so with in-depth user research and customer development, and incorporating pricing into those conversations. As Giancarlo Lionetti, who heads up Product Marketing and Demand Generation at Dropbox for Business shares,

“We really respect the value that we give to the user with the free product, but we do a lot of aggressive testing to see like what that threshold is. What do our users really care about? … One we’ll do a lot of surveying. We’ll ask our users, do they value X feature enough to pay for it, right? There’s a lot of interactions with our users so we really understand the value they’re getting. And if it’s worth actual dollars to them, or is it just amusing. We do conjoints, we do user studies.”

Slack makes another great example. Their core offering is free for an unlimited period of time, but its message archives are capped at 10,000 messages and file storage is limited to 5GB. Once a free user runs up against those limitations, Slack has in-app notifications suggesting that users upgrade to a paid version. Kelly Watkins, Head of Global Marketing at Slack explains,

“One of the differences between a free plan and our paid plans is that one could transition to a paid plan so you have access to your entire archive of messages for all time. On the free plan, that’s limited to 10,000 of your most recent messages. So generally within the product, when you get to that threshold of 10,000 messages and go over that, we have a very small notification to you that says, “Hey, you know if you would like to have access to your entire archive, that’s available, and here’s how you access that.”

Expensify similarly tracks usage to pinpoint when a company may be ready to become a paying customer. Specifically, what they’ve found, according to Jason Mills, is as follows:

“If you get about three or more users in your company submitting things your way, that’s a signal to us that there’s a latent opportunity here. And that’s an opportunity that we need to reach out and have a better conversation around.”

Expensify also charges based on the number of active users, which gives them a great expansion opportunity as individuals share Expensify with their teams, and then their departments and entire companies.

In summary, start by making it incredibly easy for people to use your product. The value should come before the paywall sets in. After they’ve fallen in love with your product, include key features in paid plans that users are willing to pay for and communicate with your customers when their usage indicates that they’re ready to pay up. Finally, grow accounts over time with value metrics and packages that naturally scale as customers get more and more hooked on the product. With these tips, you’ll be able to implement a well-oiled PLG approach to pricing in no time.

This article is an excerpt of OpenView’s PLG Playbook. Sign up to receive additional chapters as they are released here.

The post How Product-led Companies Like Expensify & Dropbox Approach Pricing to Grow The Bottom Line appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The whole concept of e-commerce began to take shape in 1989 with the development an internet-based system that did e-commerce transactions for the first time.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, online retail sales account for over a third of the overall retail sales done in the U.S. With these facts in mind, it’s no secret that the eCommerce industry is booming. Some studies even predict that eCommerce sales will reach over $400 billion annually over the next few years.

But, for eCommerce stores, the industry can also be extremely competitive. Here are seven tips from ecommerce experts across the globe, to boost your eCommerce revenue quarter after quarter.

1) Tap into influencers

Influencer marketing isn’t exactly new, but far too many eCommerce businesses still aren’t taking advantage of it.

Sid Bharath of Thinkific says, “eCommerce businesses need to tap into the power of social media influencers. Influencer marketing has been around for years but it’s only starting to become mainstream (as in smaller businesses now have access to influencers) and it’s become crucial to generating traffic, especially since other traditional sources, like SEO and ads, are getting tougher.”

Essentially the goal is to build strategic partnerships with key individuals who have influence over potential buyers. They could be celebrities or industry experts, but generally they take on the role of influencers because they can bring in large quantities of would-be customers.

2) Diversify across the Internet

I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage, ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. This is especially true when it comes to eCommerce.

“One of the best ways to boost sales revenue is by participating in
multi-channel selling. One study from Stitch Labs shows that merchants who sell on just one marketplace (in addition to their own online store) experience a 38% increase in revenue, compared to when they sold exclusively on their site. Managing all of these difference channels can be a challenge, especially when it comes to inventory, but if everything is properly integrated, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue,” explains Liz Hull of Merchant Maverick.

3) Focus on visitor conversions

Many businesses make the mistake of focusing only on web traffic, or how many visits does a web site visit. But in reality, equal focus should be placed on converting visitors into customers.

According to Best in Class research from Inflow, making small changes to an ecommerce site, such as implementing an exit offer, ungating a customer’s wish list and implementing a one page checkout can all lead to higher conversion rates.

4) Branding remains important

Even if you’re a new ecommerce business, it’s imperative to never ignore branding. After all, products and services have lifecycles but brands have staying power.

Branding includes everything from your logo and website, to your messaging. The last thing you want to end up with is consumers who are confused about who you are and what you stand for.

5) Build relationships with clients

Maintaining good customer relationships still remains a pivotal cornerstone in business, and the move toward e-commerce and more online sales hasn’t changed that. It just alters the interactions from face-to-face to more of an online customer support service.

Charlotte Lynch of Modern Retail elaborates, “One way to get more web traffic [and engagement] is having a blog and offering your customers help rather than just a sale. For example, for a clothing eCommerce site a blog post during Summer with 5 summer outfits on trend now bring people to your site, builds up a relationship, helps them and they then click through to your site to buy a summer outfit.”

6) Max out protection

In this day of cyber attacks, building a secure web site and financial payment structure is doubly important. Consumers won’t come to a site that has been known for getting hacked, so imply a secure payment processor and a protected site.

“Merchants should look at other ways to increase security and defend revenue streams which won’t impact conversion, such as chargeback mitigation, better reporting, ensuring MID health and reducing operational costs. They can essentially have their cake and eat it too by maintaining solid, yet unobtrusive, authentication standards. This encourages shoppers to complete transactions, while also protecting revenue streams more effectively,” advises David Decorte of Chargebacks 911.

7) Use video marketing

Video marketing is essentially the modern version of TV commercials. It is the new way to get your message and product out to the online public. It’s currently one of the most effective forms of marketing because it presents visuals of your business in a way that the consumer base can peruse at their convenience and leisure.

Miljana Mitic of GoodVidio talks about other benefits of video marketing, “SEO-savvy ecommerce marketers use rich media to attract visitors. One such example is videos, which on average lead to 157% more organic search traffic.”

E-commerce continues to grow as people are looking for convenience in an increasingly fast-paced world. The fact that online sites can provide greater selections than even a store makes shopping online even more appealing.

With the demand in the e-commerce continuing to expand, don’t get left behind. Staying up on trends in the eCommerce industry will help you boost web traffic, conversions and ultimately, sales.

Following the loss of Advanced Search in the recent LinkedIn update, hundreds of salespeople announced they were cancelling their accounts.

But if you know what you’re doing, the latest upgrade won't harm your social selling strategy. It actually means you can find, connect with, and sell to prospects just as successfully as before -- maybe even more. 

1) Prospecting

Search for Your Ideal Buyer Profile

If you have a list of the target companies that match your Ideal Buyer Profile, type each business name into the search bar and hit Search.

Select Companies from the navigation bar underneath and find your target business in the drop down menu.

Open the Company page to see if they are a good fit based on size, vertical, maturity, similar companies, and/or recent updates.

If they seem like a fit, click on their list of employees. Identify which ones match your Buyer Persona and request to connect with them (see #2 for more details.)

Do you have mutual connections? Ask one of them to introduce you. Just like real-world networking, your outreach will be more successful if referred by someone the prospect already knows, likes, and trusts.

Search for Your Buyer Persona

If you know the role of your Buyer Persona, you can type that job title into the search bar and click Search. The People tab will display a list of results from a range of different companies on LinkedIn.

Use the power of Boolean search. The options available are AND, OR and NOT. Parenthetical searches for a complex search and quotation marks to signify an exact phrase are also still allowed.

Once some results are displayed, you can filter by first, second, and third-degree connections. You can also select additional criteria like Location, Company, or Industry.
As with the previous version of LinkedIn, you can save three custom searches. Whenever a new user fits these criteria, you’ll receive an email alert. Saving searches reduces the number of ad hoc searches you’ll run, helping you avoid going over the free limit.

2) Connecting

The jewel in the crown of this update is the option for free users to personalize their connection invitation.

Writing a custom request previously required selecting the “friend,” “colleague,” “customer,” or “alumni” option or using “other” and entering their email address.

If you didn’t use one of those options, you were forced to send a default "I’d like to add you to my LinkedIn network" request or buy a premium package to send InMail messages.

Go to someone’s profile, click “Connect,” and then select “Add a Note.”

Explain why you’re requesting to connect: Does the person know you from a recent networking event or trade show? Alternatively, describe what’s in it for them if they connect with you.

One of the biggest mistakes I see on LinkedIn is coming on too strongly to prospects. Including a time and date for a meeting in your connection request is the equivalent of trying to kiss someone at a party before you’ve even asked their name. In the real world, you would expect to get a slap for being presumptuous.

It’s no different on LinkedIn. Let them agree to "shake your hand" before you take the conversation any further. Without this crucial step, your connection request might be ignored or, worse, reported as "I don’t know this person" and your account restricted.

3) Engaging

Do you typically launch straight into a sales pitch two seconds after meeting someone? No, you find a way to start a conversation -- normally by making a comment or asking a question. If the other person ends up revealing a problem, you try to help them.

LinkedIn has applied this concept to its new Notifications section. This section helps salespeople interact with their connections on a more human level by suggesting “non-salesy” messages, such as:

• Happy birthday.
• Congrats on the promotion or work anniversary.
• Thanks for endorsing me.

Use these messages to initiate, advance, or revive relationships with prospects. For example, after congratulating someone for a promotion, ask a related question such as “Are you still involved in finding solutions for [problem your product can solve]?” Be creative.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool that allows salespeople to amplify their networking reach beyond the confines of the traditional business breakfast. Use your free account to identify, connect with, and help local, national, and global opportunities. When buyers both understand how your product or service can solve their problem and know, like, and trust you as a person, their purchase becomes a no-brainer. You don’t have to sell.

Let’s be real: Most salespeople are annoying. They view their prospects as numbers in their sales funnel, not as people. They believe earning your business is a chess match and a signed contract means they “won the game.”

However, the average prospect doesn't know how to purchase anything that falls outside their area of expertise. Think about it. Do you really know how to buy a TV? Do you know what precise technical questions to ask? You’d probably like some help, right?

But when the salesperson at the electronic store asks if she can help, what do you typically respond with? “No, I'm just browsing.”

The cat-and-mouse game buyers and salespeople play has created an unproductive, competitive environment that doesn't benefit either party.

One of the most common culprits? The questions you're asking your prospects. Luckily, once you know where you're going wrong, you can course-correct. Stop asking these 15 common questions -- or at the least, rephrase them.

15 Dumb Sales Questions to Avoid

1) "What is your budget?" or "What would you like to spend?"

Buyers often rationalize lying to salespeople about their budget because they feel it is the necessary first step in a negotiation. And why do you need to know about budget up front anyway? If the buyer has purchased what you are selling in the past, they will have money to spend. If they have not -- how will they know what price is right?

Instead of demanding a budget right off the bat, strive to understand the prospect’s process for buying and their spend tolerance. Simply asking about their buying process for your type of product or service will get you a lot better information than asking specifically about budget.

2) "What's more important to you, price or quality?"

Shame on you for asking this question. If you beat the competition solely on price, just come out and say it. However if you are not the low-cost provider, you need to build value. Your prospects will naturally associate a given amount of value with “what the product is supposed to cost” so a good salesperson will try to understand that perspective and discuss price from there.

3) "Are you the decision maker?"

This is a bad question because it’s unclear. Are you asking if they’re the decision maker for which vendors move on to the next step in the buying process? Or are you asking if they can they sign off on the proposal? This puts the prospect in an ego predicament. No one wants to feel as if they are just the informer.

Instead, ask the question,“Who is involved in this process?” Even the CEO gets input from others (or at least he or she should). This should reveal all relevant influencers, stakeholders, and the ultimate decision maker.

Salespeople need to identify the decision makers so they can work with these stakeholders throughout the buying process. Too often we leave it to others to sell our products and services to executives because we failed to appropriately engage them.

4) "What's your biggest pain point?"

You won’t get the answer simply by asking. Most salespeople stop probing for pain once they hear an indicator such as, “If this doesn’t go well, I will get fired.” However, pain is rooted in emotion. In this example, the pain isn’t the potential of getting fired -- it’s the emotion associated with getting fired.

Everything we buy is bought emotionally, so unless you know the pain, how can you truly help? Seek to understand the prospect's underlying emotional need for change.

5) "How good are your products and services?"

This is a legitimate sales question to ask if your product or service promises to improve the prospect’s business results. However, if you pose it in this way, prepare yourself for a biased answer.

How can you get an honest response? Ask questions around how the business is doing from a third-party perspective, or versus the competition. For instance:

• When you lose, why do you lose?
• What do your customers say about your products and services?
• What percentage of your business is referrals?

6) "How strategic are you?"

Ego will not allow your prospect to say “not at all” (even if that’s the truth). On the other hand, if they do show vulnerability, they will likely blame the company or others for it (which shows they are not truly strategic).

Instead of asking this question at all, simply listen to your prospects’ answers to other queries. I guarantee you will discover if they are strategic or not.

7) "Would you like a proposal or quote?"

When you ask this question, you will likely get blown off one of two ways. You will be either be told “I am happy with my current vendor” or “I don’t want to waste your time.”

Another possibility is that the prospect will gladly take your proposal ... and use it to price check their current vendor. Your proposal then functions as intel for your competition. Finally, the prospect could request your proposal simply to get you out of their hair.

A proposal should simply be a summary of expectations both parties have already agreed upon. It should only be sent once you have agreed on scope, pricing, timing, etc., and serves as documentation for the work being completed. It does not sell anything in and of itself.

8) "Can I show you our capabilities?" or "Would you like a presentation?"

Show and tell is for your nine-year-old. If you are presenting, you are not selling. You are bragging. Don't brag.

9) "Is this a good time to chat?"

Do you think your prospects sit in their offices hoping a salesperson calls? There is never time, but people can make time if they want to. This question gives your prospect an easy out. A better way to ask this question is, “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

10) "What level of service are you willing to pay for?"

This question implies that your relationship is only about money, and that’s just not true. Sales is about balancing what the prospect needs with what they want. Your questions should inform you about the prospect’s business so you can discuss appropriate solutions.

Build value, not budgets. If your business offers multiple service levels, ask the relevant questions in order to make a recommendation.

11) "Who is your competition?"

You should do research before you talk to prospects to identify their biggest rivals. Asking this question makes you look like you're uninformed on their industry and company. Have some ideas about who their competition is, but don't want to jump to conclusions? Try asking your prospect, "I did some research, and it looks like your biggest competitors are X, Y, and Z. Does that sound right to you?"

This question allows you to verify your findings without losing face or seeming ill-prepared.

12) "What can I do?" or "What will it take to earn your business?"

This sets you up for failure because you are now just an order taker. The prospect tells you in this moment what it will take to get a signed contract ... and they will continue to tell you what you have to do for the rest of the relationship. This isn’t exactly the partnership you touted when trying to earn the business. This question also implies that you will take on anyone and are willing to be insincere to close a deal.

Get to know the prospect’s business, their pains, and how you can help. If it makes sense to work together, it will happen. If not, move on.

13) "Who was the best salesperson who ever called on you?"

Who cares? Are you going to be inauthentic and act like someone else to try to earn the business? Would you ask your spouse who was the best person they ever dated? Forgo this question in lieu of more valuable and revealing queries.

14) "What do you dislike about your current vendor?"

The objective here is totally transparent: You're trying to identify weaknesses in your prospect's current supplier relationship so you can position yourself as a better alternative. If the buyer says, "Their shipments are frequently late," you'll predictably say something along the lines of, "We're always on time; ask our customers," or "We move mountains to deliver our goods on the right date." 

It's actually less persuasive to present your company's strengths reactively. The prospect will wonder if you're only touting that specific detail because you're trying to amp up their dissatisfaction. Instead, delve into their priorities and needs and position your offering accordingly. Your pitch will feel more genuine.

15) "Can you tell me about your business?"

Unlike questions that dig into your prospect's needs, objectives, and strategic initiatives, asking them to tell you about their business is solely for your benefit. In addition, posing such a high-level, broad question tells the buyer you haven't even bothered to browse their company website before the call.

A good sales professional has virtually no cap on earning potential, but it takes more than practice to attain mastery. Top salespeople continuously develop and refine sales skills through learning -- with the help of a coach, trainer, manager, or on their own. Don't you think asking great questions is one of those critical skills?

This post was originally published in August 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.

Testing in an enterprise is truly a team sport.

If a testing program was a football team, its lead would be the QB. They can set the tone and direction, but without the support of a good offensive line, they’ll be scrambling to get any real results.

To get a good “offensive line” in your company, you’ll need to get buy-in from the right people.

Lean technology companies can rapidly test with as few as one person, but in a large corporation, knowing how to navigate the organization is just as important as understanding proper statistical power.

The first step is knowing how to sell optimization. People have plenty of natural barriers to optimization practices, so you’ll have to address them up front and make doing this work a no-brainer.

Here are some of the best selling points you can use:

1. Emphasize it’s about finding answers together

Testing is a process to finding answers to your business problems in a scientific way.

Rationally, that makes perfect sense, but few people think this way. Most have been trained to think they must have answers, have been rewarded when they were right, and punished when they were wrong.

Sell testing as a relief to this stress: none of us have the answers, but all of us have great ideas. All of those ideas are equal and we can follow this process to solve them together. No more HiPPOs.

2. It’s not more work

Words like “optimization” and “experiments” sound complicated and hard.

Everyone is already overloaded and wants to avoid extra complexity. Optimization doesn’t have to be difficult, though, especially in the beginning.

Website and email A/B testing tools make it dead simple to run tests and handle the calculations that trip people up in the beginning. You’ll eventually want to increase the complexity for bigger results and answers to tougher business questions, but to get off the ground and find quick wins, it’s remarkably easy.

As the leader of an optimization initiative, you need to make it as easy as possible to get started with the right tools and systems. Get these testing tools in place so it’s easy. Create things like test checklists and other reference materials that make the process easy to follow.

You should also shoulder the load and do as much as you can in the beginning. Once results start coming in and people see the value, they’ll naturally get more involved and interested in the legwork. Numbers talk. Once you have them, you can focus on building out the conversion optimization team and asking for a greater investment in the program.

3. It reduces your risk

Testing seems risky to people. What if the new thing we try doesn’t work? What if we miss out on sales directing traffic to a failed variation? New things are always scary and feel dangerous. Emphasize that while it may feel that way, optimization actually reduces your risk.

There’s the famous business joke of investing in employees:

CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?”

CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

Optimization works the same way. Sure, something may seem to work fine now, but what if there’s something that could sell three times better you don’t know about? The opportunity cost is massive.

The best companies are constantly reinventing and finding better ways to do things. If they aren’t moving forward, they are going backwards. Optimization is the best way to do this. It rapidly evaluates ideas before you spend valuable time and money on them. It finds problems before they cost you.

The real risk is in not knowing what works and doesn’t before it’s too late.

Also, clarify that you can start small. You don’t have to do a 50/50 split of traffic to your site with 500k visitors if that makes people queasy. Do a small sliver of that traffic they feel comfortable using. Tests can start small and get started on the path to greater findings.

4. Emphasize tangible outcomes, not optimization itself

People don’t really care about optimization. They care about the results optimization can bring, so speak in that language.

Testing isn’t about improving open rates by x%, it’s about generating more good leads for your funnel. Or more products sold. Or more revenue.

They don’t care about conversion rates, they care about the extra profit that brings in. Always be mindful of the language you use when describing optimization’s value. The classic marketing adage is selling benefits, not features. Do the same here.

5. The greatest innovators follow this process

Everyone gets excited by innovation. How many companies are trying to sell themselves on “fast-paced startup” cultures? Optimization is a chance to practice what you preach.

Ask any group of people in your company what the most innovative companies in the world are and everyone will say Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Guess what every one of those does? They test and optimize.

Every great inventor and innovator in history has had a process of experimentation that led to massive breakthroughs. If you want to be one of the best, this isn’t something that’s just nice to have. It’s essential.

Once you’ve prepared your selling points, it’s time to bring them to the right people.

Funnily enough, the first step is actually not needing to use those selling points.

6. Start with the people that need the least convincing and make them your pilot program

In a big organization, there are many teams and departments you can work with on optimization. See who’s already interested, the least skeptical, and ready to work on it right away. Focus on teams you have rapport with and that like to try new things. You don’t have to spend energy selling everyone on doing this. You just have to find the ones willing and ready to go and make them your pilot group.

It’s also important to focus on teams you know can get stuff done. Pay attention to who expresses interest but doesn’t ever get around to doing the work to complete a test. In the beginning, you need quick wins, so don’t get held up on teams or projects that don’t move. Interest doesn’t always lead to action.

7. Get a sponsor from the top

You’ll need an influencer in the organization to really get the off the ground. They’ll legitimize the effort and have the ability to push through barriers that block you.

Again, focus on someone you, or someone else you know well, has rapport with and that supports trying new things. Use the tactics above to emphasize the benefits. Most importantly, lay out how you can start this small with low risk and effort. Find smaller tests for quick wins. Find easy ways to begin testing big assumptions.

Find problems they already have and demonstrate how optimization can find their solution. Report back your findings with hard numbers, especially ones relevant to their performance metrics, and you’ll have full buy-in at the top.

Conclusion

Follow these steps and you’ll have the cultural building blocks for an optimization program. In summary, here are my tips:

1. Emphasize that it it’s a way to find answer together.
2. Make it known that it’s not more work.
3. Sell the fact that it is risk mitigation.
4. Emphasize tangible outcomes, not optimization itself.
5. Remind people the most innovative companies do experimentation.
6. Start with the people that need the least convincing and make them your pilot program.
7. Get a sponsor from the top.

Optimization is a collaborative process, and by understanding your selling points, finding a willing team to pilot test the initiative with, and getting some sponsorship from influencers in the company, you’ll have the foundation you need.

What about you – any tips or hacks you’ve used to get organizational buy-in for CRO? This is more of an art than a science, so I’d love to hear any tactics used successfully.

Knowing what metrics matter—and how to utilize those metrics to prove marketing’s impact on overall business revenue—is crucial for modern marketers. In 2016, a record number of CMOs lost their jobs, and studies suggest that metrics neglect may have played a part. 70% of senior business leaders expect marketing to drive revenue growth for their organizations, but only 6% of CMOs spend their time defining routes to revenue.

According to Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council:

CMOs now have to show they are impacting business growth right from the outset, or they are likely to be short-lived on the job.

There are an endless number of metrics that marketers—and SEOs, specifically—can track, but attempting to monitor all of those metrics would require a significant amount of effort that would likely yield a low ROI. Instead, choose specific metrics that illustrate how SEO is aiding department or organizational goals, and focus on how those metrics can lead to revenue-driving insights and growth.

User Intent Metrics

Part of the foundation of any effective SEO strategy is keyword and user intent research. No amount of technical SEO will drive organic rankings if content fails to satisfy the user’s need for target keywords. If it doesn’t rank, it won’t drive traffic.

There are three major metrics that provide insights regarding user intent. If your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts are linked, you can find all of these values in a single view. Open Google Analytics, click on the “Acquisition” tab, expand “Search Console,” and click “Landing Pages”:

• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of users who arrived on your page from search and failed to perform any other action on your site. In some cases, high bounce rates signal low engagement or misaligned user intent. In others—particularly for content-heavy, informational sites—high bounce rates may simply signal low-performing CTAs or ineffective funneling. Depending on the content, high bounce rate is not necessarily a terrible thing.

• Time On Page: Time on page is an average of how long users view a page before performing a secondary action (clicking the back button, clicking a link, etc.). Low average time on page numbers signal that users did not find what they were looking for.

• Pages Per Session: Pages per session reports the average number of pages that users visit after landing on a specific page. Pages per session serves as an indicator of the effectiveness of funneling. If the average pages per session for a landing page is one, it’s a signal that CTAs and other funneling approaches aren’t working.

Review and monitor these user intent metrics to identify places where site pages and content is failing to meet users’ needs.

• If pages have high bounce rates and low time-on-page averages, conduct user intent research by reviewing other top search results for referring queries. This helps identify what users are looking for when using that query, and allows you to better cater to searcher’s needs.

• If you have low page-per-session averages, A/B test CTAs to identify which are effective and which aren’t. Additionally, conduct user intent research to make sure your content is catered to searchers’ likely positions in the purchasing funnel for referring queries.

• If user intent metrics are unfavorable overall, consider site experience issues that may be impacting the visitor experience. Slow load speeds, a poorly functioning mobile site, confusing site navigation, and intrusive interstitials may be driving users away. Consider investing in user testing software to identify user experience issues.

By optimizing your content to better cater to user needs, you’ll ideally see a spike in search traffic and conversions. That data can be used to highlight the revenue that SEO is building for the organization.

Search Traffic & Conversions

Measuring changes in organic search traffic is basic SEO. When organic traffic increases, it’s usually a signal of successful optimization. When organic traffic decreases, it indicates that there’s an issue that needs to be addressed.

Increased organic traffic represents enhanced search visibility, a greater probability for lead generation, and an increased likelihood of conversions. But as an isolated metric, increases in organic traffic yield nebulous returns. Yes, optimization is working, but to what end? To give this metric meaning, you must highlight the correlation between organic traffic and revenue.

Set up goals in your analytics platform to establish metrics for how increased organic traffic impacts revenue via leads generated or completed conversions:

1. Add a thank-you page that visitors land on after completing a desired action, such as downloading gated materials, requesting more information, or making a purchase.
2. Set up goals in your analytics platform that track visits to each thank-you page.
3. Create funnels for multiple-step goals. This allows you to see where the drop-off point is in your sales funnel, so you can focus efforts and test changes.

By tracking and reporting organic traffic increases in this way, you can attribute increases in revenue—leads generated and conversions—directly back to optimization efforts.

Additionally, this enables the gathering of valuable optimization insights by allowing you to track which pages led to goal completions. The highest performing pages can then be analyzed to learn what’s working well, and those insights can be applied to optimize low-performing pages.

Search Queries & Position

Two other important metrics to track are search queries and average position in results. This highlights what search terms are driving organic traffic, and where pages that rank for those terms are positioned in results.

Search queries and average position can be accessed in Google Search Console:

1. Expand “Search Traffic”
2. Select “Search Analytics”
3. Check “Clicks” and “Position” to show those data fields
4. Set the radio button to “Queries”

First, separate queries into branded—those that include company or product names—and unbranded buckets. Increases in branded search traffic can be reported as an indicator of increased brand awareness. To measure changes in branded search traffic, record how many clicks branded search queries bring in each month, and compare results month-over-month to highlight increases in brand awareness.

For non-branded queries, you’ll want to focus on the position column. The value in the position column indicates where—on average—your content appears in search results for the respective query. If the number in the position column is 15, it means your content averages a ranking in position 15 for that query. Click on the result, and then change the radio button at the top to “Pages” to see which page earns results for that query.

Average position is a powerful metric:

• It highlights terms that have too much competition. Search terms with double-digit average positions may need to be revisited and optimized for less competitive keywords.

• It highlights content improvement opportunities. If the average position for a term is high in the search results but not number one, you can take steps to optimize the page to earn the top placement. Review the outranking pages. Are they more comprehensive? Is a competitor’s featured snippet stealing traffic from your results? If so, revisit and update high-ranking pages: add additional content, include content that’s optimized for features snippets, and remove/update any outdated information.

• It highlights valuable link-building opportunities. If content that ranks on page one, but not position one, is just as comprehensive as content ranked above it, it may be time to launch a link-earning or PR campaign to drive more incoming links to that piece of content. Securing additional incoming links may bump your page into the top position.

Monitoring search terms and rankings can help highlight revenue impact through reduced advertising costs. If an organization allocates a portion of its advertising budget to AdWords, that cost can be eliminated or reduced with high organic rankings. Determine the CPC of high-ranking search terms, and multiply that by incoming organic traffic.

For example, if 5,000 visitors arrived using a search term that costs $0.50 per click through PPC, you can boast that SEO has potentially saved the company $2,500 in advertising costs.

Of course, ads can appear above organic listings, so they should get more clicks, right? Not necessarily. A recent study conducted by Moz and Jumpshot found that while 60% of searches result in a click, only 2.6% result in a click on an AdWords ad.

Using SEO Performance Metrics to Drive Revenue and Prove Value

By highlighting the direct impact of SEO on both costs and revenue, you can better illustrate the effectiveness of marketing’s efforts to company leadership. It takes time to set up goals, gather data-driven insights, and establish these reports, but the ability to prove the value of your efforts to leadership is worth the upfront effort.

By highlighting the impacts of SEO on revenue—and using the right metrics to improve those impacts—you can secure demand for SEO in the evolving, data-driven, modern marketing landscape.

When it comes to building out your brand’s social media marketing strategy, one of your primary objectives is crafting a multi-channel amplification plan for sharing content that raises awareness, fosters engagement, and ultimately helps drive new leads. For many, this means mapping tactics and time to specific brand-owned social channels.

But there may be one tactic and channel that’s missing from your mix: your employees and their respective social networks. Or to attach a marketing buzzword to this—employee advocacy.

Your employees are one of your most powerful social media marketing tools. They’re the people behind your brand, working hard to support your company’s mission and help achieve your business goals. They’re the people who have first-hand insights into your company’s culture, and the quality of your products or services. They’re the people who can lend some real credibility and authenticity to your marketing efforts.

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Your employees are one of your most powerful #socialmediamarketing tools. #employeeadvocacy
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The best part? Technically speaking, including employees in your marketing efforts doesn’t cost you a thing, but can yield big rewards. In fact, brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by employees versus the brand, according to an MLS Group infographic. In addition, employee advocacy on social media can help generate more leads, close sales more quickly, and help retain customers.

Now that we have that out of the way, you’re probably wondering how you get your employees on board or how to start an employee advocacy program. At TopRank Marketing, employee advocacy is a part of our own social strategy. Below I share some helpful tips to get your efforts rolling.

#1 – Get buy-in from top leadership.

Getting your company’s top executives and department leaders to support your employee advocacy efforts is a critical first step. Not only will their social activity help spread your message throughout their social network, but also lend credibility that will trickle down throughout the rest of the company ranks.

Get them on board by illustrating the business value their efforts can bring to the company. LinkedIn’s SlideShare is bursting with presentations featuring employee advocacy insights, case studies and statistics that you can use to craft a short, sweet and data-filled pitch. Here are a couple I’d recommend checking out for ideas:

• 16 Employee Advocacy Statistics to Guide Your 2016 Marketing Strategy (Kredible)
• Measuring and Optimizing Employee Advocacy (LinkedIn Marketing Solutions)
• How to Sell Your Company on Employee Advocacy (SocialChorus)

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The 1st step for #employeeadvocacy on #socialmedia? Getting buy-in from top leadership.
Click To Tweet

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#2 – Activate employee brand ambassadors.

It’s no secret that social media has become part of the fabric of our daily lives. And let’s face it, your employees are probably engaging on their respective platforms while at work every day—and they may already be sharing content about your brand. So why not leverage that?

Consider creating an employee brand ambassador committee where participants can work with your marketing team to develop or refine your employee advocacy program, as well as coach others into becoming social champions. Do a little research to find out which employees are actively sharing your brand’s content, compile your list and then reach out. When you make contact, thank them for their efforts, ask them to become a more integral part of your company’s social media strategy, and demonstrate the benefits.

At the end of the day, brand ambassadors will likely have more drive and pride in spreading the word about your brand, and they’ll also be an on-the-ground advocate encouraging others to join in.

#3 – Make participation easy and fun.

If you want your employees to take action on social media, you have to make it easy and comfortable for them. Here are a few tips to consider:

Draft pre-written social messages.

By pre-writing social media messages for your employees to share, all they need to do is copy, paste and click the post button. Easy peasy.

Also, make sure to include a mix of company-related content and curated industry content. This will help them stay up to date on the latest news items, create a helpful mix of content to their audience, and help expand their network of followers.

Set clear guidelines on how they should be sharing your content.

Most employees’ social accounts will include both personal and professional postings—and you’ll want to make sure their audience knows that your content is part of the latter for transparency. Consider creating a company-specific hashtag to include in all messaging. For example, Dell employees use #IWork4Dell and Adobe folks use #adobelife in all their posts.

Offer social training.

Some of your employees may want to get involved, but are uncomfortable with their skill level—especially when it comes to promoting your brand or their own presence at an event. Offer group or one-on-one training to get them up to speed on best practices.

Make helpful tools available.

As a marketer, you likely use social media tools to help you monitor and manage your brand’s social presence. Many of those same tools can help your employees manage their advocacy efforts, too. Compile a list of free tools and make it easily accessible to all employees so they can manage their sharing on their own.

If you have a larger budget, consider investing in an enterprise employee advocacy tool such as Oktopost, Sociabble or Hootsuite Amplify to make it easy for employees to share or suggest content. In addition, consider using a tool that offers a gamification element such as leader boards, badge earning or other incentives. This can add a little fun to the mix, as well as inspire a little friendly competition. Of course, gamification isn’t a sure-fire way to get participation or sustain it, but when combined with other strategic efforts, it can definitely help.

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If you want your employees to take action on #socialmedia, you have to make it easy. #employeeadvocacy
Click To Tweet

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#4 – Show them they’re making a positive impact.

Once you’ve gotten your employees to start sharing, the next step is to ensure they keep it up. And one way to do that is to highlight the positive impact they’re having by sharing encouraging metrics and sales insights.

For example, TopRank Marketing Director of Agency Marketing Ashley Zeckman regularly updates the team on how our activity is contributing to brand visibility through impressions and social shares. She also recognizes the top sharers—which typically sparks some friendly competition around the office.

#5 – Don’t force it.

The beauty of employee advocacy on social media is its authenticity. As I mentioned in my opening, your employees have unique insight into what your company is all about. So, whatever you do, do not mandate employee social sharing. A mandate will stifle that authenticity and leave a bad taste.

Is employee advocacy part of your social media marketing strategy? How are you getting them on board? Tell us in the comments section below.

Disclaimer: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions and Dell are TopRank Marketing clients.

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It happens to even the best of sales managers: end of quarter is fast approaching, and your quota isn’t shrinking, but the chances of your team making it are. Now is usually the time when managers start to pace the sales floor, pushing reps to dial faster and sitting in on calls in hopes of expediting the close.

There are lots of tactics and strategies that can be used to turn things around, but no one said that knowing which strings to pull to make the biggest possible difference in the least amount of time would be easy. So, whether you’re worried about one rep or your entire team falling short, here are three important reasons why your reps may be missing quota that you’ve probably never thought of before.

You’re Not Utilizing Their Strengths

While your top performers obviously have great strength in key areas, you may be surprised to find that your underperformers actually excel at undervalued or underutilized aspects of your sales funnel. This concept is extremely important, as sales is a weak link “sport.” This means that for your team to be successful, you need everyone on your team to perform well, as opposed to relying on just a few star players.

To pinpoint certain strengths and weaknesses in your team, try first segmenting your deals by industry. Then, further segment these deals by sales rep. In doing so, you may discover that, while top performers may rock at closing deals from your company’s key verticals, maybe an “underperformer” is actually skilled at developing relationships with customers from less popular verticals. In this case, you can start routing all deals from this vertical to this rep, and ask her to explore how your business might expand or enhance its presence and value offering in this industry.

This same approach can be followed for deals from particular lead sources, with particular contact titles and more. The ability to identify and leverage the strengths of each rep on your team is the mark of a great sales manager and enables reps to hit quota from both an individual and team perspective.

They’re Closing the Wrong Deals

One of the most frustrating situations for managers and reps alike is when win rate looks good, but pipeline value is down. So despite all your great work closing, your quota is still out of reach from a revenue perspective. In addition to some serious exploration of how your team can increase its average contract value, this situation also calls for a deep dive into the types of customers your reps are closing.

To understand what sets one lead apart from another and identify the types of leads generating the most value for your business, segment your deals by lead qualities like source, industry, title, size, etc., and then measure their lead yield. Lead yield is equal to Sales Revenue / Number of Wins Generated. You can learn more about it in this blog post, as well as see a breakdown of lead yield by industry below:

As you can see, these results tell us that Media is the industry with the highest lead yield, followed closely by eCommerce and Travel/Hospitality. First of all, this warrants a discussion with the marketing team, whose budget would clearly be better invested in channels that produce leads from these verticals than others.

Secondly, this discovery also offers guidance for which leads reps should be prioritizing in their outreach. Finally, and most importantly, while eCommerce leads have the second highest yield out of all industries, they represent a very small percentage of wins. Figuring out how to generate more eCommerce leads and training reps to more effectively close them can mean big news for your quota.

Activities Are Outweighing Outcomes

When used correctly, there is no doubt that activity metrics can be among the most useful and impactful sales data available. Where the problem starts is when managers and reps get caught up in hitting call quotas and lose sight of what should be their ultimate goal: closing business. You can make 500 calls and book one meeting, or you can make 100 calls and book ten. Outcomes speak louder than activities.

If you have reps who stay late and dial like lightning but are still falling behind the rest of the pack, you may be experiencing a case of “productivity placebo effect.” This means that it may feel like your team is being productive, but in reality you are mistaking busyness for effectiveness. That’s why the most meaningful activity metrics look at the outcomes rather than the number of activities that reps complete, as shown in the report below.

Only when you understand the outcomes of activities can you begin to comprehend the impact that they make and the steps that you can take to improve them. Shifting focus from counting activities to maximizing effectiveness shows when it comes to quota attainment.

Dig into Your Data

If you’ll notice, each of these three reasons can be uncovered by paying close attention to your sales data. Being a data-driven sales leader is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies getting in the way of reps hitting their quota. To learn more about how to take this scientific approach to sales management, download the free eBook, From Art to Science: 5 Steps to Predictable Sales Growth.

What if your SaaS company’s website doesn’t bring enough leads? Or maybe it brings you the wrong audience? There’s one thing that may help you solve these problems (apart from having a solid marketing plan, of course).

It is a simple three-word phrase and it can put you in good stead. Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Let’s discuss the USP and its benefits.

What Is a Unique Selling Proposition?

Let’s start by taking a look at how Unique Selling Proposition is defined across a few sources:

Business Set Free defines a Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, as “the reason that you give for why people should buy from you and not from the others.” This is a simple and accurate definition.

If you want a more sophisticated definition, here is one from the Entrepreneur. The USP is “the factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason that one product or service is different from and better than that of the competition.”

This USP accurately shows how the product differs from the others. (source: contentful.com)

In other words, we can say that a Unique Selling Proposition is what your business stands for. It highlights your business and shows why it is unique. Here’s another example of a USP, where the target audience is immediately clear.

(source: github.com)

How Can a USP Help You in Promoting Your SaaS Business?

You probably already have a good idea of the advantages that a USP brings to your cloud-based business. So, let’s clarify them.

The first and most obvious is that a USP will allow your product to claim a unique place in the market and stand out among competitors.

Kissmetrics’ article, “What a Unique Selling Proposition Really Means & Why Your Business MUST Have One,” provides the very clear example of Zappos, an online retailer.

It says, “Zappos has a unique selling proposition that is quite simple: have the best return policy ever. A return policy that removes the fear of buying online and buying shoes that might not fit.”

Here is how Zappos “bribes” its customers:

Zappos stresses the uniqueness of their service in the form of their USP. This has allowed them to claim their place in the market and become one of the most popular online stores in the world.

Another benefit of having a USP is that your sales efforts will always be targeted successfully.

Vend, a retail point of sale (POS), inventory management, and e-commerce cloud software, provides an excellent example.

source: vendhq.com

They accurately define their audience and aim precisely at the type of customers they need who will benefit from their product.

This helps not only raise sales of the product but also access the customers who are most in need of your SaaS solution.

The creation of a USP makes sense not just for the improvement of your product’s promotion. Managing a SaaS business without a clear Unique Selling Proposition is next to impossible.

Corbett Barr, co-founder and CEO of FizzleCo, states, “It’s possible, but definitely not as easy. And success without a good USP requires better product development and promotion, along with some outside factors (maybe a little luck).”

Of course, you can always invest large amounts in product development. But this does not guarantee you success. And it is obvious that relying on luck and word of mouth is not the best plan.

In fact, today the buying process begins earlier than ever and often excludes the company selling a product for a long time. A fact confirmed by CEB’s research, “buyers have (on average) progressed 57% through their buying process before they engage a salesperson.”

source: cebglobal.com

This means that you need to have something to catch the attention of a potential customer and make him choose you as a solution provider.

In addition, according to the “Research In Action GmbH” report, having a clear USP equates to 35% of a successful marketing strategy.

source: sumerian.com

If you understand the significance of marketing, you must have a USP.

How to Define Your USP

According to Entrepreneur’s article, “Unique Selling Proposition,” you need to “Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.”

This means that you have to try to think like a potential customer. You should attempt to understand what it might take to make him choose your product instead of a product from one of your competitors. This will help determine the value of your product for your audience.

Here is the example of Basecamp, a SaaS management tool. You can see how their USP expresses all the problems their customers can face.

source: basecamp.com

You can also check websites such as Capterra, Getapp and G2 Crowd to find user reviews about your competitors‘ products and find out what annoys or pleases their customers. This information will help you understand how your product can attract that audience.

If your company provides customer service software, you can check users’ feedbacks on similar products like Zendesk.

source: capterra.com

The inclusion of a point like, “Chat support on lower plans,” in your USP will certainly attract some customers.

You can also write directly to your competitors’ users and ask what features they like in the product they are using. Of course, this will require a certain amount of courage, but the result will be worth it.

We should mention one more thing. As Corbett Barr says, “Do not try to please everyone because you will end up pleasing no one.”

You need to demonstrate clarity on exactly for whom your product is designed. Customers are reluctant to deal with firms that claim their solution is suitable for everyone.

Here is an example of an organization that knows their potential audience very well.

source: bamboohr.com

You want your customer to immediately see that your product meets their needs. 

What Does A USP Look Like?

There are several types of USPs, which I will quickly describe.

1. A one-liner with a subtitle of a few sentences.

Simple and catchy USPs help many companies achieve success.

source: dropbox.com

This type of USP is also the most popular.

ChartMogul analyzed the 40+ top SaaS landing pages and came to the conclusion that most companies use one-liners, followed by a subtitle of one to two sentences.

The difficulty with this style is that you must fit all of the necessary information about your product into a very restricted format.

2. A list of customer benefits and an enumeration of your guarantees.

source: springsled.com

With a USP like this, you will be able to show potential customers all of the benefits of your product and assure them that they will succeed if they choose your service.

Your potential customers will see that you clearly understand the difficulties they are facing and that you are capable of solving them.

3. Imagery or video that conveys your USP.

Webengage made a short video that you can find on their landing page. It plays the role of a USP and serves as a brief introduction to their product.

source: webengage.com

Many people prefer to receive information in video, and this trend is increasing as mobile video consumption grows each year.

Another advantage of the video format is that it allows you to tell more about the product than just a simple one-liner.

Of course, creating a clip requires additional time and money, but the result are often worth it.

Here is the last (and quite obvious) piece of advice: once you develop your perfect USP, put it on a landing page.

According to “Scrolling and Attention” research by Nielsen Norman Group, “website visitors users spend 80% of their time looking at the information above the page fold. This includes your headline, unique selling proposition, and CTA.”

Slack’s landing page follows this pattern: Headline, USP, and Call to Action all in one bundle. 

(source: slack.com)

Wrap-Up

You’ve gotten this far in the article, so you’ve witnessed that a USP is very valuable for SaaS business’. Its creation is worth your organization’s time and money. Here are some key takeaways.

1. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is the reason that you give for why people should buy from you and not from the competition. It is something that represents and briefly describes your SaaS business.
2. A USP allows your cloud-based product to claim a unique place in the market and stand out among competitors.
3. With a good USP, you will always target the right audience.
4. It is difficult to achieve success without a clear USP in the cloud business because the buying process begins before the customer communicates directly with the company.
5. To define your USP, you must try to think like a customer. You can check software review websites to find users’ opinions about your competitors‘ products and understand what they like or dislike. You can also ask competitors’ users directly about what aspects of the product suit them or not.
6. Your USP can be a one-liner or a list of customer benefits and an enumeration of your guarantees. A USP can also be supported by an image or a video.
7. A USP should be placed on your landing page because website visitors spend 80% of their time looking at the information above the page fold. And it is a perfect spot to catch their attention.

Do you have any advice to share on how to create and utilize a stellar USP? Or, an example of an organization that’s doing a great job? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

 

 

The post Unique Selling Propositions for SaaS: Stand Out or Go Home appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

What if your SaaS company’s website doesn’t bring enough leads? Or maybe it brings you the wrong audience? There’s one thing that may help you solve these problems (apart from having a solid marketing plan, of course).

It is a simple three-word phrase and it can put you in good stead. Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Let’s discuss the USP and its benefits.

What Is a Unique Selling Proposition?

Let’s start by taking a look at how Unique Selling Proposition is defined across a few sources:

Business Set Free defines a Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, as “the reason that you give for why people should buy from you and not from the others.” This is a simple and accurate definition.

If you want a more sophisticated definition, here is one from the Entrepreneur. The USP is “the factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason that one product or service is different from and better than that of the competition.”

This USP accurately shows how the product differs from the others. (source: contentful.com)

In other words, we can say that a Unique Selling Proposition is what your business stands for. It highlights your business and shows why it is unique. Here’s another example of a USP, where the target audience is immediately clear.

(source: github.com)

How Can a USP Help You in Promoting Your SaaS Business?

You probably already have a good idea of the advantages that a USP brings to your cloud-based business. So, let’s clarify them.

The first and most obvious is that a USP will allow your product to claim a unique place in the market and stand out among competitors.

Kissmetrics’ article, “What a Unique Selling Proposition Really Means & Why Your Business MUST Have One,” provides the very clear example of Zappos, an online retailer.

It says, “Zappos has a unique selling proposition that is quite simple: have the best return policy ever. A return policy that removes the fear of buying online and buying shoes that might not fit.”

Here is how Zappos “bribes” its customers:

Zappos stresses the uniqueness of their service in the form of their USP. This has allowed them to claim their place in the market and become one of the most popular online stores in the world.

Another benefit of having a USP is that your sales efforts will always be targeted successfully.

Vend, a retail point of sale (POS), inventory management, and e-commerce cloud software, provides an excellent example.

source: vendhq.com

They accurately define their audience and aim precisely at the type of customers they need who will benefit from their product.

This helps not only raise sales of the product but also access the customers who are most in need of your SaaS solution.

The creation of a USP makes sense not just for the improvement of your product’s promotion. Managing a SaaS business without a clear Unique Selling Proposition is next to impossible.

Corbett Barr, co-founder and CEO of FizzleCo, states, “It’s possible, but definitely not as easy. And success without a good USP requires better product development and promotion, along with some outside factors (maybe a little luck).”

Of course, you can always invest large amounts in product development. But this does not guarantee you success. And it is obvious that relying on luck and word of mouth is not the best plan.

In fact, today the buying process begins earlier than ever and often excludes the company selling a product for a long time. A fact confirmed by CEB’s research, “buyers have (on average) progressed 57% through their buying process before they engage a salesperson.”

source: cebglobal.com

This means that you need to have something to catch the attention of a potential customer and make him choose you as a solution provider.

In addition, according to the “Research In Action GmbH” report, having a clear USP equates to 35% of a successful marketing strategy.

source: sumerian.com

If you understand the significance of marketing, you must have a USP.

How to Define Your USP

According to Entrepreneur’s article, “Unique Selling Proposition,” you need to “Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.”

This means that you have to try to think like a potential customer. You should attempt to understand what it might take to make him choose your product instead of a product from one of your competitors. This will help determine the value of your product for your audience.

Here is the example of Basecamp, a SaaS management tool. You can see how their USP expresses all the problems their customers can face.

source: basecamp.com

You can also check websites such as Capterra, Getapp and G2 Crowd to find user reviews about your competitors‘ products and find out what annoys or pleases their customers. This information will help you understand how your product can attract that audience.

If your company provides customer service software, you can check users’ feedbacks on similar products like Zendesk.

source: capterra.com

The inclusion of a point like, “Chat support on lower plans,” in your USP will certainly attract some customers.

You can also write directly to your competitors’ users and ask what features they like in the product they are using. Of course, this will require a certain amount of courage, but the result will be worth it.

We should mention one more thing. As Corbett Barr says, “Do not try to please everyone because you will end up pleasing no one.”

You need to demonstrate clarity on exactly for whom your product is designed. Customers are reluctant to deal with firms that claim their solution is suitable for everyone.

Here is an example of an organization that knows their potential audience very well.

source: bamboohr.com

You want your customer to immediately see that your product meets their needs.

What Does A USP Look Like?

There are several types of USPs, which I will quickly describe.

1. A one-liner with a subtitle of a few sentences.

Simple and catchy USPs help many companies achieve success.

source: dropbox.com

This type of USP is also the most popular.

ChartMogul analyzed the 40+ top SaaS landing pages and came to the conclusion that most companies use one-liners, followed by a subtitle of one to two sentences.

The difficulty with this style is that you must fit all of the necessary information about your product into a very restricted format.

2. A list of customer benefits and an enumeration of your guarantees.

source: springsled.com

With a USP like this, you will be able to show potential customers all of the benefits of your product and assure them that they will succeed if they choose your service.

Your potential customers will see that you clearly understand the difficulties they are facing and that you are capable of solving them.

3. Imagery or video that conveys your USP.

Webengage made a short video that you can find on their landing page. It plays the role of a USP and serves as a brief introduction to their product.

source: webengage.com

Many people prefer to receive information in video, and this trend is increasing as mobile video consumption grows each year.

Another advantage of the video format is that it allows you to tell more about the product than just a simple one-liner.

Of course, creating a clip requires additional time and money, but the result are often worth it.

Here is the last (and quite obvious) piece of advice: once you develop your perfect USP, put it on a landing page.

According to “Scrolling and Attention” research by Nielsen Norman Group, “website visitors users spend 80% of their time looking at the information above the page fold. This includes your headline, unique selling proposition, and CTA.”

Slack’s landing page follows this pattern: Headline, USP, and Call to Action all in one bundle.

(source: slack.com)

Wrap-Up

You’ve gotten this far in the article, so you’ve witnessed that a USP is very valuable for SaaS business’. Its creation is worth your organization’s time and money. Here are some key takeaways.

1. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is the reason that you give for why people should buy from you and not from the competition. It is something that represents and briefly describes your SaaS business.
2. A USP allows your cloud-based product to claim a unique place in the market and stand out among competitors.
3. With a good USP, you will always target the right audience.
4. It is difficult to achieve success without a clear USP in the cloud business because the buying process begins before the customer communicates directly with the company.
5. To define your USP, you must try to think like a customer. You can check software review websites to find users’ opinions about your competitors‘ products and understand what they like or dislike. You can also ask competitors’ users directly about what aspects of the product suit them or not.
6. Your USP can be a one-liner or a list of customer benefits and an enumeration of your guarantees. A USP can also be supported by an image or a video.
7. A USP should be placed on your landing page because website visitors spend 80% of their time looking at the information above the page fold. And it is a perfect spot to catch their attention.

Do you have any advice to share on how to create and utilize a stellar USP? Or, an example of an organization that’s doing a great job? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Salespeople often complain about the quality of leads they get from marketing. Likewise, marketing departments tend to complain that salespeople don’t follow up on the leads they work so hard to produce. You know the drill. It’s a double-edged sword and a source of significant friction inside many companies.

A successful sales consultant recently told me a story about an organization that held a webinar that attracted 400 participants. It was an enormous success for the marketing folks, who handed all 400 leads directly to the sales department. The sales department then took the list, stashed it in a drawer, and went back to what they were doing.

What a waste!

The sales department claimed that they didn’t know which of the 400 leads were worth following up on, and that it was too time-consuming to figure it out. They had higher priorities. Needless to say, the marketing department was not happy.

This shouldn’t happen. And, in an ideal scenario, sales and marketing would work in tandem, smoothly handing the baton off on each new highly qualified lead. When the two departments are well-aligned in this manner, marketing can substantially support sales effectiveness. Here’s what that looks like, and how to achieve it.

What is sales effectiveness?

Let’s start by defining what sales effectiveness actually means. Sales effectiveness refers to much more than simply efficiency or performance. An efficient team completes tasks with little waste, but they may not be the right tasks or in the right order to achieve great results. A high-performing individual may sell a lot, but if the factors that lead to that success are not systematized, the person’s fine performance won’t contribute to a highly effective sales team.

Instead, an effective sales team operates like a well-oiled machine, doing the right activities at the right times to achieve prime and predictable sales results. Effectiveness demands a formal, dynamic, optimized sales process, quality training and coaching, the right technology, good leadership, and the right people in the right places at the right times. When such a system is connected to an effective marketing system, the result is an extremely high performance that continues to improve over time.

Sales Effectiveness Begins with Using the Right Tools, The Right Way

Many sales organizations invest in customer relationship managerment (CRM) tools hoping that it will all of their sales effectiveness problems. Most are sorely disappointed. Some CRMs are designed as information repositories, not as tools to help salespeople achieve greater effectiveness. Some CRMS have all of the right features, but are used incorrectly. The truth is, CRM can drive sales effectiveness – but it’s important that you choose the right platform, and that you implement it as part of an overall sales enablement program.

At its heart, a CRM is simply a database with a user interface and some tools attached. Those tools are designed for a variety of purposes, but generally center around reporting and tracking customer interactions. The user interface and tools can be more or less helpful to salespeople, and are rarely designed to support sales effectiveness.

Too often CRM platforms are chosen for the wrong reasons, which results in the salespeople receiving the wrong tools. When choosing a CRM platform, purchasers need to be looking at the type of sales process they’re engaged in. At minimum, they should ask:

• Is this CRM made for B2B or B2C?
• Is it designed for transactional or complex sales?
• Does it support proactive or reactive selling?
• Does it come packaged with the tools we need, or will we need multiple add-ons?
• Is the interface visually pleasing and easy to use?
• Does it provide salespeople with the tools and enablement they need to achieve higher performance?
• Will it help sales managers to know who to coach about what and when?

Finally, your CRM needs to effectively facilitate the “passing of the baton” between marketing and sales. In the “put the lead information away in a drawer” example cited above, for instance, the marketing department simply gave the sales department a spreadsheet and expected them to input the data into their CRM. This data included very little actionable information about the “leads,” thus setting the sales department up for failure.

Choosing the right platform is much more than filling out a checklist of features and functionalities. Your own business processes, resources, goals, and budget should inform your selection of a marketing automation system that integrates with, and complements, your use of your CRM while meeting the needs of your business.

How the right tech stack supports sales effectiveness

When the CRM is part of a well-designed system, it can be a powerful tool for driving sales effectiveness. Such a system facilitates hand-off between marketing and sales, equipping salespeople with everything they need to quickly understand which leads to prioritize. Simultaneously, other leads are fed back into marketing automation to be nurtured. Your marketing and sales tech stack should be chosen by which platforms best meet your needs, but they also should have the ability to talk to each other.

Sales and Marketing Communication is Key

Successful integrations provide a smooth hand-off and feedback loop for both sales and marketing teams. Instead of leads going to the sales department to be stashed in a drawer, they can be passed along automatically according to rules that determine whether they’re worth a salesperson’s time. The hand-off includes behavior information on the lead, so that salespeople can see where the prospect is in the buying process, what materials they’ve already interacted with, and what they’re most interested in. This allows the salesperson to have a meaningful, personalized conversation with each of their prospects.

Pre-qualification increases pipeline quality

It’s important that leads be prequalified before they’re fed into the sales pipeline, to ensure they’re ready for the sales team. Make sure that your marketing automation/CRM combination provides tools to systematize this pre-qualification process. Once a lead has reached a qualification point based on fit and behavioral information, the sales team can further enrich each account with information they gain from their interactions. The team can then progress qualified leads through the sales process — and feed the ones that need further nurturing back into the marketing automation system, along with all the information they’ve gathered. This creates the closed-loop reporting needed to measure the joint effectiveness of sales and marketing, from converting a lead to winning the business.

The nexus of connected marketing automation and CRM is the central command center for managing and tracking campaigns across multiple channels through the entire lead lifecycle, from lead capture to revenue booked. The connection yields intelligence that can be gathered no other way.

This intelligence enables marketing, customer success, and sales teams to work together to make smarter decisions about where to invest precious time, validate the activities that lift the company’s bottom line, and have meaningful interactions that focus on the customer.

How to start using advanced content analytics

Analytics, in general, is key to performance optimization. Getting accurate feedback on what is working and what not helps companies make improvements that will lead to better outcomes. And when content is the center of your business, Advanced Content Analytics becomes the center of your Big Data analytics. By now, most businesses have heard of the Advanced Analytics and how it can generate value from large amounts of warehouse and fresh data. But despite this, most marketers today are struggling to measure whether anyone is using their content, how often their content is used, how much their content engages customers, and most importantly – whether their content has any impact on sales. Advanced Content Analytics using today’s sophisticated tools and techniques can make it easier to measure the outcomes of your content.

What are analytics and what are their types?

According to RapidMiner, analytics is a term that refers to the skills, applications, technologies, and practices used in the exploration and investigation of data in order to gain insight that will help drive future business planning. They also divide analytics into two major areas: Business Intelligence (BI) and Advanced Analytics. While BI uses a consistent set of metrics to measure past performances, Advanced Analytics goes beyond this using sophisticated modeling techniques that can help predict future events. A definition of Advanced Analytics by Gartner Inc. is autonomous or semi-autonomous examining of data or content using sophisticated tools that are beyond those of traditional BI. Examples of Advanced Analytics tools include data/text mining, pattern matching, visualization, semantic analysis, neural networks, and complex event processing just to name a few.

A perfect match of technology with expertise

However, not everyone agrees with the current definition of Advanced Analytics with some seeing it simply as a subset of BI. A Data Science and Analytics Company called Recovery Decision Science explains that while Advanced Analytics refers to future-oriented analysis, that the only thing that’s future about them is the actual business decision based on analyses of current or past data. With that being said, Recovery Decision Science argues that Advanced Analytics should not be defined in terms of time orientation neither by the techniques used. Instead, they offer a different definition of Advanced Analytics: any computer-based analytics technique relying on both modern software technology as well as the expertise of the analyst.

Analysis of content

When it comes to Advanced Content Analytics, in particular, the term simply refers to the use of Advanced Analytics used to measure the outcomes of their content. Businesses that rely on content to generate leads and sales are always on the search for new ways to measure the impact of their content marketing strategies. This will help direct their future endeavors such as determining the right content for the right customer. In Advanced Content Analytics, the goal is to measure lead generation, measure the number of direct leads compared to assisted leads, and measuring intricate details beyond page visits, views, and downloads such as time spent on a page, number of scrolls, and even benchmarking.

The controversy of Content Analytics

So, as you can see Advanced Analytics is that it is more efficient in solving business problems. However, Advanced Content Analytics have a long way to go before they are able to truly measure the impact of their content and with that, predict business outcomes. This is especially evident when you look at current statistics showing that 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy and most find measuring ROI from content marketing to remain a top challenge. Most businesses rely on views alone showing a clear lack of analytics tool that would help generate leads or at least measure ROI. A recent study by Content Marketing Institute even found that only 38% of B2B companies stated that content marketing was an effective strategy.

Tools used in Content Analytics

But who exactly needs Advanced Content Analytics? Well, in the early days of content marketing, simply putting out content was considered enough of an accomplishment. But today, internet noise and clutter means that any business using content marketing in their business strategy will need to put more effort in what content they put out in order to be heard. This is where Advanced Analytics step in as a valuable tool. While some may see Google Analytics as being sufficient to plan future strategies, other like to dig deeper into their data by using Google Analytics plugins such as Scroll Depth, Riveted, or tools like Piwik that features things like event tracking, keyword search, and visitor maps. When you combine these tools with the knowledge of a skilled data science, you just may get ahead in the completive world of content marketing.

Things to keep in mind

However, keep in mind that Advanced Content Analytics is difficult to master. It involves much more than relying on the flashy new tools and features to examine the impact of your content, be it for micro-influencer marketing or simple content marketing. Instead, you should focus first on establishing a good enough content strategy aligned with your business objective. Once you get serious about your Content Analytics strategy, you’ll start diving into things deeper than data mapping and data aggregation such as contextual discovery, predictive analysis, linguistic modeling, and semantic profiling and analysis among other things. But most importantly, you will see that outsourcing won’t work as well with Advanced Content Analytics as would hiring professionals to work within your company in the given context of your business.

Conclusion

Advanced Content Analytics is a relatively new term in the world of Advanced Analytics and that is lacking suitable tools and techniques. Businesses that rely on content in their marketing strategy find that measuring ROI is difficult and most seem to rely on views and downloads as their main metric. However, new technologies as well as advancements in the science of data analysis have made measuring the impact of content and determine future outcomes easier. Now, tools and techniques are used to help businesses put out only content their business can have use of.

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, visitors to your site will stay less than 59 seconds before leaving if you don’t capture their attention. That’s a lot of pressure, but if you are doing your job as an inbound marketer, capturing the attention of your visitors won’t be such a difficult thing to do.

Moving visitors to your site through the sales funnel is the ultimate goal of inbound marketing. Making sure that those who visit your site can find useful blogs no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey is important because not only will it help move them along the sales funnel but if they can’t find what they are looking for quickly they will leave and find it somewhere else.

What is the sales funnel?

The sales funnel is comprised of the different stages a person typically goes through before buying a product or service. Below is a visual from HubSpot that shows the difference between top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.

Blogging for Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

Blogging effectively for the top of the funnel audience involves a lot of awareness stage content. At the awareness stage, visitors want to learn more about the problem; sometimes they might not even know they have a problem yet. The goal of your awareness stage blog posts should be to help your audience become aware of this problem and help them understand how it relates to their current situation.

There is a lot of “How to,” “Improve,” and “Prevent” content in this stage. An example of an awareness stage blog post title would be, “How to Plan a Corporate Retreat That Everyone Will Love.” Again, the focus here is to educate and inform. These posts should be simple and easy to understand. The CTA at the bottom of awareness blog posts should include a relevant ebook to the topic that you’re blogging about.

Blogging for Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

Blogging effectively for the middle of the funnel involves consideration stage content. At the consideration stage, leads want to find solutions to their problems. CTAs for consideration-type content should be a comparison guide or helpful tool that will push them to making a purchase decision.

An example of a consideration stage blog post title would be, “Planning Affordable Corporate Retreats in Napa Valley.” These posts should have more data and be a bit more lengthy since the lead is more invested in fixing their problem or need. It’s important to not just focus on your brand at this point in time. The reader is still weighing their options and looking around so if you try to make this more of a decision piece they will more than likely become disinterested.

Blogging for Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

Blogging effectively for the bottom of the funnel involves decision stage content. At the decision stage, these potential customers want to hear how your company can help them in fixing their problem. These blog posts should talk about your company specifically and help them validate their choice. Although these posts are about your company, still keep them customer-centric and avoid being too salesy. The CTA for decision content should be around scheduling a sales call or requesting a demo, something that will push them to purchasing your product or service.

An example of a decision stage blog post title would be, “Why the Smith Hotel in Napa Valley is Perfect for Corporate Retreats.” It is helpful to include customer testimonials and visual content in this stage of the funnel.

When planning the blog posts for your company, keep the sales funnel top of mind. Providing content for all stages in the sales funnel will help increase your sales and make visitors to your site thankful that they found useful content for them.

Do you implement a blogging plan that includes content for each part of your sales funnel?

 

Back from my trip to Chicago. I had a blast and got to talk to a number of sales leaders for The Real Deal of Sales.

Not only did I learn what many sales leaders are doing today, I did a kick ass sales podcast with Will Barron, I did a presentation with Steve Richard and I got to spend time with people I hadn’t spent time with in a while.

Good times, it was fun.

Enjoy Straight Keenan 3

 

The post Sales Coaching and Leadership – Straight Keenan 3 appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Value-based pricing is based on understanding how your offer creates value for your customers. The standard way to do this is to see how you can improve their statement of profit and loss. Understanding this is a good start, but does it really enable to right conversations with your customers? In many cases the answer is no. You have to go beyond this and understand how your customer's offer helps their customers.

The key to value based pricing is trust. Your customers have to trust (believe) in your value propositions. How do you earn this trust? The best way to do this is to demonstrate that you concerned about their business and how you can make it better. You start by demonstrating understanding.

You need to define your own benefits, counteract your competitors, ignore what doesn't matter to the customer and find ways to cover the unmet needs.

The standard approach to value-based pricing is to look for six types of positive value drivers and then to figure out how your offer has an impact that is different from the next best competitive alternative.

• Grow Revenue - How do you help your customer to grow its revenues (These tend to be the most compelling value drivers. You can help a customer expand the market, win market share, or enter new markets. More granularly you can accelerate their pipeline, improve the win rate, reduce churn and help them to grow in existing customers. Helping customers to launch new products is a revenue value driver.)
• Decrease Operating Costs - There are many ways to do this, but focus on ways to improve yields and find production efficiencies.
• Decrease Operating Capital - People often overlook this but is can have a big impact. (Look for things like reducing inventory and accelerating collections.)
• Decrease Capital Costs - Find ways to reduce fixed investments, extend the life of capital assets, prevent capital assets from going offline, convert capital costs into operating costs (in cases where this improves your customer's economics).
• Reduce Risk - This is one of the most important value drivers in an uncertain world. It can be hard to communicate though and is most effective with customers who already use formal methods to quantify risk, such as insurance financial and energy companies. Otherwise, it is often an emotional value driver rather than an economic value driver.
• Offer an Option - Many companies make a strategic choice to have options, and there is a value to being the option. Like risk, this can only be an economic value driver for customers who have ways to quantify the value of an option, otherwise, it is an emotional value driver and not an economic value driver.

(Note: In healthcare, there are three classes of value driver, economic, emotional and clinical outcomes.)

Just as you need to convince your customer of your value drivers, your customer needs to do the same with its customers. You win over customers by understanding how you help your customers deliver value to their own customers.

To do this, you have to understand how your customers segment their own markets, how they prioritize value for each of those segments and then align your value messages with their value messages and segments. You then ask how your offer makes your customers more competitive.

See if you can answer the following questions.

1. How does this customer segment its market?
2. What segments does it target?
3. How does it create differentiated value in its target segment?
4. How does my offer (i) enhance my customers' differentiated value or (ii) reduce their competitors' advantages?
5. How does my market segmentation map to my customer's market segmentation? (You can get insights into your own segmentation by understanding how your customers segment their own markets and seeing if and how these align.)

Ibbaka can help you to answer these questions. We are students of value creation and can help you to better understand your customers and align your value to their value. This alignment is a powerful competitive advantage.

 

Ten Actions That Can Ensure You Hire the Right Sales Professional

By Richard Libin, President, Automotive Profit Builders

APB.cc, rlibin@apb.cc

A meme making the social media circuit, which caught my attention called. It is called, “10 Things That Require Zero Talent.” When I first saw it I thought, the person who put this together may have read my first book, “Who Stopped the Sale?” as many of these points are emphasized throughout. Since then, I’ve thought about how simple and to the point it was, especially when it came to sales professionals. 

Here is the original list: 

1. Being on Time

2. Work Ethic

3. Effort

4. Body Language

5. Energy

6. Attitude

7. Passion

8. Be Coachable

9. Doing Extra

10. Being Prepared 

If sales professionals embraced these 10 actions every day, they would see an immediate improvement in their sales and overall success. In addition, these factors should be essential criteria job applicants offer a business, and more important by managers seeking to bring highly qualified professionals on to their teams or to promote from within. It’s this simple: if a manager doesn’t look for these 10 items they are more likely to hire the wrong person. Let’s look at each of these from this perspective. 

Being on Time

This alone should be a deal breaker. There are so many resources available today that help individuals plan routes and avoid construction and traffic, that there is no real excuse for being late. If a job candidate is late for an interview, a manager should wonder if they will show up to work or appointments on time after being hired? How can you rely on someone who can’t show up? 

Work Ethic

Delve into a candidates work history. Find out when they had their first job - starting early indicates a good work ethic. Find out what they did to prepare for the interview. Did they check the website, check Linkedin and do other research? The more preparation time put in before coming to the interview, the better their work ethic may be. 

Effort

An often-overlooked key to success is effort. Salespeople who put in extraordinary effort, who are willing to work harder than expected to achieve results, are simply more successful. Ask candidates what they do when faced with a situation where someone has told them no. What do they do when faced with seemingly unsurmountable challenges? 

Body Language

Proper body language can build confidence in coworkers and customers. Take notice whether or not the candidate maintains eye contact, speaks in a low, steady voice, uses their hands for emphasis not from nerves, smiles and offers a strong handshake. 

Energy

How a person contributes to their company is as important as what they contribute. A sales professional may have experience, knowledge, skill, and a history of success; however, without positive energy their skills cannot be fully realized. Pay attention to the person’s energy level. Are they positive or do come off as tired and bored?

Passion

Sales professionals who are passionate about their jobs are committed to consistently achieving higher levels of performance. Yet, according to Deloitte University Press, “Up to 87.7 percent of America’s workforce … doesn't have passion for their work. Less than 12.3 percent of America’s workforce possesses the attributes of worker passion.” Ask how did the candidate handled tough situations? Look for a desire for continual learning, improvement and challenge. Is the candidate willing to try new ideas and take risks that benefit an organization?

Coachable

This is the most important of the10 items. If a person is coachable, you can take their positive attributes and polish them into something even better. Does the candidate seem to have an answer for everything? Do they correct you or talk over you? Do they interrupt? If you offer a suggestion, do they listen or shrug it off? These are signs that an individual may not be coachable. If they aren’t, coachable, what you see is what you get.

Doing Extra

What beyond their assigned job responsibilities has the candidate done in their previous roles? Do they serve on committees? Do they lead teams? Are they involved in employee programs? Do they go the extra mile for customers and help solve problems? Or do they come in, work their hours and leave? Sales professionals who do extra are committed to being their best, to their customers and to their employers.

Being Prepared

Preparation is essential to performing at the top of your game. Successful preparation requires the ability to pay attention, identify and solve problems. During the interview, notice whether or not the candidates listens carefully. Do they take accountability for the successes and challenges in their careers? Can they think quickly and solve problems? 

Attitude

It’s all about attitude. All of the first nine traits are influenced by attitude. If a candidate scores low in any of the other nine traits, chances are, they don’t have a positive attitude and may not be the best addition to a team. 

As you consider these items, think about your customers, your team and your needs in an employee. Then ask yourself, what are you doing to ensure the people you hire bring these traits and improve your team.

 

Richard F. Libin has written two acclaimed books that help people of all walks of life improve their sales skills, because as he says, “everyone is a selling something.” His most recent book, Who Knew? (Who-Knew.com), was published in early 2017. His first book, “Who Stopped the Sale?” (WhoStoppedTheSale.com), is now in its second edition. As president of APB-Automotive Profit Builders, Inc., a firm with more than 48 years experience working with both sales and service professionals, he helps his clientele, through personnel development and technology, to build customer satisfaction and maximize gross profits in their businesses. Mr. Libin can be reached at rlibin@apb.cc or 508-626-9200 or www.apb.cc.

Happy almost summer! Things are feeling just about right around here. My oldest is home from Butler and today starts his first internship. My daughter returns later this week from completing her first year in Kansas State’s grueling architecture program, and my high school junior had his banquet/prom this weekend. Last night we grilled out on the patio with our small group and joked that if the weather was like this all the time the real estate prices would be much higher! Summer is definitely in the air – especially with the St. Louis Cardinals getting hot.

I spent last week criss-crossing the U.S. speaking to sales teams and sales leaders – reminding them of the basics. What struck me more than anything, particularly when meeting with executives and sales managers, was how little attention they were giving to arming their salespeople with the necessary weapons and preparing them for the sales battle. While flying home half-comatose from the crazy week of travel that included an overnight redeye from California to Carolina, the two predominant themes of the week collided in my small brain leading to this blog post: The Arrival of Summer and Ill-Equipped Sales Teams.

Sales Managers (or executives over sales teams), are you darn sure that you’ve got the basics covered?

A. Pointing the Team Toward Strategic Target Accounts: When salespeople are permitted to live in reactive mode, they don’t need a list. They simply respond to inbound leads, customers who raise their hand, and opportunities that come their way. BUT the moment we ask our sellers to become proactive, intentional, and strategic, the very first thing they need is a list of strategic targets accounts (of both growable existing customers and prospective customers) to pursue. This is too critical to overlook or take for granted. That’s why Selecting Targets is the first piece of the New Sales Driver framework in New Sales. Simplified. Managers, are you darn sure that your salespeople have strategic, focused, workable lists of accounts that you and they agree they should be pursuing? It’s YOUR JOB to ensure that your team members are pointed in the right direction. Don’t abdicate this critical responsibility. Even the most talented sellers will not produce optimal results chasing the wrong targets. Do each of your people have a list to strategic targets that they have committed to proactively pursuing to create sales opportunities AND that you are committed to hold them accountable for pursuing?

B. Arming Salespeople with a Compelling, Customer Issue-Focused, Differentiating Story: If there’s a topic I’ve covered more than this one in the past six years, I can’t think of it. You know why? Because the “Sales Story” is your sales team’s single most critical weapon. How in the world can you expect your people to make prospecting calls, send emails, conduct early-stage discovery meetings, demos, presentations, or draft proposals if they cannot articulate the value your solution delivers? It’s on you to arm your sellers with a usable, powerful, relevant “story” that will not only give you people confidence to do their jobs, but make them significantly more successful. If you are looking for help, Chapter 8 of New Sales. Simplified. has everything you need to draft this type of highly effective story. And in the near future, we’ll be launching some new content that includes an online toolkit to help managers and salespeople complete the very same “Sharpening Your Sales Story” exercise that I do during live workshops with client teams. But for now, let me ask:  Can your salespeople articulate compelling reasons that customers buy from/turn to/trust your company/solution? Can they weave other client success stories comfortably into their conversations? Can they explain why your offering or the experience/outcome from working with your company is better and different?  If they can’t, that’s on you, sales leader.

C. Ensuring That Your Salespeople Can Properly Fire the Basic Sales Weapons: It’s one thing to arm your team, it’s another to ensure that they are proficient at using those weapons. Can your sales reps make effective prospecting calls that result in meetings with prospects? I mean it. Are you confident that your people can secure discovery meetings with strategic target prospects? And once they do secure that oh-so-imporant early-stage meeting, are they able to conduct an effective discovery meeting? Do they “own” the meeting? Can they set it up well by sharing their agenda and getting the customer’s input and buy-in?  Can they properly deploy the “story” mentioned in the point above – to credential and position themselves, and to warm up the prospect to answer their questions? Speaking of questions, are your people armed with a solid list of insightful probing questions that uncover pain, opportunity, and answers to sales/buying process questions (who, who else, how, when, etc.)? And can they ask those questions without coming across like an amateur, or worse, a prosecuting attorney that makes the prospect feel like they’re on the witness stand? I won’t even ask about “next-level” sales weapons like demos or presentations, because that only opens up a bigger can of worms.

D. Your Salespeople Understand That Developing New Business is THE Primary Job and Their Calendars and Activity Metrics Prove It:  Ouch! This one may sting a bit, but it needs to said. The single biggest reason sales teams don’t deliver more new business? Yup. The salespeople are not spending enough time working on new business. Brilliant, I know. So…how are you doing at monitoring the sales battle? How sure are you that your people are attacking the targets they committed to attacking? How clear and effective are your 1:1 accountability meetings? You are doing those, right? Instead of just staring into the CRM or sending emails asking about the pipeline, you are meeting 1:1 with your people and having live conversations about what new opportunities they’ve added to the pipeline. I see way way too many salespeople who have forgotten their primary job. They spend hours and hours babysitting favorite pet accounts and “maintaining their territories” (their exact words), yet almost no dedicated time is blocked off to devote to prospecting and developing new business. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the pipeline isn’t getting filled with new opportunities or that the new business isn’t being acquired at the desired rate. It’s pretty darn simple: Little Effort = Little Results.

A quick word to individual salespeople: while this post was directed at your boss, take one quick minute to look in the mirror. At the end of the day, you are the one responsible for your results and providing for yourself or your family. So, before pointing the finger of blame at your manager or company who hasn’t pointed you well, equipped you well, or held you accountable well, ask yourself what you are doing to ensure that you have items A through D covered.

And to sales leaders, I share this exhortation: I don’t know your individual situation or how much your company has placed on you that keeps you from getting to the very simple basics described in this post. But this I do know for sure: If you do not point your team, arm your team, ensure that your team is proficient at firing the most basic weapons, and actually executing the sales attack, whatever else you are doing is pointless. Trust me that your summer vacation will be a lot more fun and refreshing if you can get away knowing that you’ve set your sellers up to succeed.