Rnordman

I am not romantic about cold calling. Nor am I romantic about social selling, even though I probably use the tools as well as most. There are different mediums one can use to create new opportunities, and it doesn’t make sense to eliminate one medium simply because another medium is available. There is simply nothing about any medium that makes it an exclusive choice. Like a toolbox, you use different tools for different purposes.

There are people, however, who are romantic about “social selling,” and they believe that older mediums—like the telephone—are no longer valuable. Mostly, these folks sell “social selling.” They have set up cold calling, something salespeople don’t like, as a straw man to have something to rail against to gain clients.

My friends at Sales for Life published this post as evidence that cold calling was facing its demise. This is a rebuttal.

Cold Calling has a poor conversion rate. The article uses Keller Research Center’s research to show that conversion rate at 1 percent. That research was based on real estate agents, not B2B sales professionals. Your conversion rate is your own. Your cold calling may not work, but my cold calling works just fine.

Only 28 percent of those cold calls engaged in conversations. Same research, but be that as it may, if I could speak to 3 out of every 10 people I connected with, that would be more than enough. But again, you need to skills to engage people in conversation.

Forrester says 37 percent of order takers and 27 percent of explainer archetypes will be displaced. Why do people hate cold calling? Because they are conflict averse. Guess what makes you are order-taker or an explainer? Being conflict averse. But so does hiding behind social platforms and using email.

Salespeople are becoming obsolete, with 1,000,000 sellers losing their job to self service e-commerce. There is zero doubt this is true, but Twitter isn’t going to save you. Neither is LinkedIn. Only business acumen and deep chops can help you. You are either a trusted advisor, or you are something less than that.

B2B e-commerce will top 1.1 trillion dollars and account for 12.1 percent of all B2B sales. That number will grow. It is irrelevant to any argument about cold calling, and that number will grow regardless of whether or not you passively wait for opportunities to come to you. I would argue that aggressively pursuing a seat at the table is better advice.

There are more people involved in buying decisions, requiring a team selling approach. This has nothing whatsoever to do with cold calling.  In regard to an argument about cold calling, it should be ignored.

Nine out of ten top-level decision-makers don’t respond to cold outreach. Again, if you have nothing worth their time, this is true. But that speaks only to your chops, and says nothing about the medium. You are free to believe what you want, but when your competitor fearlessly picks up the phone and has something to say, believing this will hurt you. You are better improving the value you create. That said, every day people use the phone and schedule appointments with decision-makers. This “statistic” is suspect at best.

75 percent of B2B leaders say that they regularly use social media in their decision-making process. What’s interesting here is that the people who would recommend you use the telephone would recommend you all use every other channel. This statistic is suspect, and says nothing about how social is being used.

Salesforce reports that 74 percent of buyers choose a salesperson who is first to add value and insight. But how do you cut through the clutter on social? How do you engage in real life conversations where you can share your insights? What’s the fastest way to get in front of a client and share your insight? Still, nothing about cold calling.

20 percent of salespeople add value to the process and have five times greater engagement with buyers. Well, that make sense. There is a top 20 percent for a reason, is there not? What does it say about cold calling?

84 percent of B2B leaders start their buying journey with referrals and cold calling cannot reach the vast majority of B2B decision makers. Seriously? The same folks that fear the phone are even more timid when it comes to asking for referrals. So much passivity, so much waiting. Are you going to live forever? Does speed to results count for anything? This “data point” is more than suspect. If this were true, your pipeline would be made up of 84 percent referrals, and it something less than that–and closer to 0 percent.

Forrester says 70 of execs say salespeople are unprepared to answer their questions, and “there is no way a salesperson on a cold call can be as prepared as a social seller.” What? So as soon as I dial, my business acumen dissipates? I’ve somehow lost my experience and situational knowledge? This makes no sense, and as such, should be ignored.

Salespeople need case studies that they don’t have. I am stumped. I really am. There is some correlation between cold calls and case studies?

90 percent of marketing professionals say you need an account-based marketing approach. Targeting? Multiple stakeholders? Messaging? Bell bottoms. This is nothing new. It’s fashion.

The average salesperson makes only two attempts to reach a prospect. “Success in social requires many touch points through a variety of channels.” That isn’t success in social, it’s success in prospecting and developing relationships. One of those touches should be the phone. Another should be face-to-face. Use social, too. This statistics adds nothing to the case that cold calling is seeing its demise.

Be careful what you believe. You are entitled to believe whatever you want, but you are not free from the consequences.

The post The Demise of Cold Calling: A Rebuttal appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Landing pages are crucial to the success of your internet marketing and advertising campaigns. The aim of a landing page is to convince users to take some actions on the website. You need to articulate benefits of your offerings in a succinct manner to accomplish this objective.

The copy on landing pages has the power to influence your users’ behavior on the site. For instance, an e-commerce site increased its conversion rate by 93% simply by rewriting the landing page copy. You will find several case studies on the internet where companies have increased their conversion rates by making small tweaks in the call-to-action text.

If you have put a lot of efforts in designing a brilliant landing page and still not getting desired results, it is time to assess your content of the page.

Many companies make following four mistakes while writing copy for the landing page which leads to an abysmally low conversion rate:

Making False Assumptions

Some companies make wrong assumptions about their potential customers. For instance, many marketers believe that people don’t have a lot of time. Thus, nobody reads the long sales pitches. This assumption makes them write short copy for their landing page. While it is true that people don’t have sufficient time, in many cases they invest significant time in searching for the right product or service which meets their requirements.

If you don’t provide enough information about the benefits of your offerings, they will simply move to the next page. Thus, test the length of the content that works best for your landing page before you make an assumption.

Take Inspiration from Companies like Twitter and LinkedIn

It is not wrong to get inspired by innovative and cool companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter. However, many entrepreneurs believe that “Landing pages of Facebook or Twitter does well with 2-3 lines of generic copy, it will also work for their business”. They are familiar brands. So, irrespective of what they write on landing pages, people know what to expect from these sites. Even a small variation in their system create a lot buzz in the media. Therefore, they don’t need to tell a lot about the product or how does it work.

The same may not be true for your business. You need to write a tailor-made content that resonates with your users. Further, you need to test and refine on the content to make it perfect for your users and business.

It ‘s nice to get inspired by these companies’ innovation model rather than landing page content.

Not Investing Enough Time in Writing Headlines

Compelling headlines can increase conversation rate significantly. Many companies have increased their conversion rate by 30% or more by testing headlines. In fact, many users only read the headlines and skim the content before making a decision. Also, if you have the long form of content, the great punch line is a must to ensure that users will scroll down the pages.

The headline need not always be emotional or hard-hitting punch lines. It could also state the definite benefits of your products and services in a succinct manner. Do some experiments with the headlines and evaluate how it impacts your conversion rate.

Providing Consumers with a lot of choices

According to a study when you give a lot of options to the customers, they may get confused. If they are unable to make a quick decision, then they may choose none.

It is particularly the case for landing pages’ content. Many marketers give four to five packages or options and all cramped into one column. It not only provides bad experiences to the customers but also leaves them baffled.

If you have a lot of varieties in your offerings, then guide users to choose a right product.

Conclusion

Your business is unique. So, general content can’t articulate the benefits of your goods or services. You must develop a mechanism to review your content periodically and make necessary changes. Also, test as much as you can until you get a perfect pitch for your business. Avoid the common mistakes mentioned in the article and have patience. Never give up until you accomplish desired business goals.

Major corporations rely on international students, temporary foreign workers and immigrants to feed Metro Vancouver’s growing high-tech sector, says a study.

In an article titled “Chinese techno-immigrants in Western Canada,” two sociologists describe how U.S. corporations, including Microsoft, have opened high-tech arms in Metro Vancouver to capitalize on Canada’s less-restrictive approach to migration.

“High-tech computer programming and computer systems analysis have been the two most common intended occupations of all skilled immigrants to Canada, most of whom come from Asia,” write SFU’s Karl Froschauer and the University of Calgary’s Lloyd Wong.

In researching what they call the “over-representation of Chinese high-tech immigrants in the high-tech sector,” the two sociologists interviewed scores of workers in an industry said to employ 110,000 people in B.C., mostly in Metro Vancouver.

“Canadian corporations look abroad for immigrants because they spend a very small fraction of their salary budget on training and because B.C. universities produce relatively few graduates in the technology field,” the professors say, citing a KPMG report.

The state of the city’s high-tech industry has become key to the election platforms of both B.C. NDP Leader John Horgan and B.C. Liberal Leader Christy Clark, with each promising to provide more training and high-tech employment for Canadians.

“British Columbia can be the new Silicon Valley. And it has to be, because we want our kids to have great jobs,” Clark said this week.

Maintaining Clark is trying to distract voters from her failed promise to bring LNG jobs to the province, Horgan said he will help companies “develop and access talent, capital, and expanded markets so we can create good-paying, forward-looking jobs across the province and make B.C. into a true high-tech hub.”

Related

• Foreign students have a big impact on Metro Vancouver
• Douglas Todd: How would Vancouver's housing bubble burst? Look to China.
• What motivates migrants to learn an official Canadian language?

In light of the political manoeuvring in B.C. over local high-tech jobs and training, the study by Froschauer and Wong quotes the president of a large B.C. high-tech association who says a key reason “Microsoft chose to open a Vancouver office was because of the easier immigration rules.”

The unidentified high-tech CEO told the researchers there’s a crucial reason Microsoft did not simply open its computer development “campus” in Redmond, Washington, which is headquarters for the global tech giant.

“It’s like two hours away, so why would they open up this campus in Vancouver?” said the CEO.

“It’s much easier to bring in (migrants from India) and others, and that’s the reason they came. And their intention is not to recruit people away from other companies in the Lower Mainland but to bring fresh people in, and that’s what the larger companies do. Small ones don’t have the means.”

High-tech companies in B.C. and Alberta also often cross the U.S. border to recruit Chinese and other foreign students, say the authors, because international students in the U.S. are generally not allowed to remain in the country after they graduate, whereas they can stay after graduation in Canada.

The sociologists do not estimate the proportion of Metro Vancouver’s high-tech sector that is made up of immigrants, international students or temporary foreign workers, but they quote the CEO in confirming migrants are “very, very useful. I don’t think we could evolve our sector without” them.

Many of the techno-migrants interviewed in the study say it’s often an advantage to be a migrant in Canada’s high-tech sector.

But others said being born outside the country can be a disadvantage, particularly because of difficulties with language.

Some people from China told the researchers that migrants from India don’t have as many problems with language, since many in the former British colony were educated in English from their childhoods.

Some high-tech executives in Metro Vancouver and Calgary favour temporary foreign workers over immigrants, add Froschauer and Wong, whose article appears in the new book, Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada (UBC Press), edited by Wong.

The sociologists learned some corporations prefer “to bring employees to British Columbia on a temporary work permit” because they can be retained longer than immigrants, who have more freedom regarding where to work.

Provincial and federal immigration programs “do not tie employees to the company, whereas the temporary work permit does,” the authors say.

The number of high-tech migrants to Canada, especially from China, is likely to continue to grow in the future, say the authors.

Another chapter of Trans-Pacific Mobilities describes how most high-tech migrants, even if they’re struggling to find jobs in Canada, have no intention of going back to their homeland in China.

“They probably know that the heyday of the ‘sea turtle’ — overseas migrants returning home to work — is over and will have no wish to join the ranks of the ‘seaweeds’ (overseas returnees waiting to find a job back home),” write professors Lucia Lo of York University, Shaolu Yu of Rhodes College and Wei Li of Arizona State University.

In addition to overseas migrants losing their old social networks in China, the professors say many high-tech migrants “came to Canada, not necessarily to advance their own careers, but to seek a better education and future for their children. Thus, returning to China is less likely to be an attractive alternative for them.”

dtodd@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/douglastodd

“What is our DIGITAL CX score?” is a question I often get asked when working with companies to improve their website experience.

What usually prompts this question is a bunch of “non-digital” issues being reported via digital feedback mechanisms: undelivered purchases, unanswered calls and emails, unacceptable product quality, inadequate return options and so on.

You want to know if your WEBSITE experience is getting better or worse and what you can do to improve it. You need to act on issues under your control: broken filters, poor search results, checkout errors.

These other issues are clouding your numbers. Right?

Hold that thought and think about the journey from your customer’s perspective. While those poor delivery or return ratings aren’t telling you directly about website satisfaction, they are VERY LIKELY to influence whether your customers return to your site to purchase another item.

Today’s customers expect a seamless omnichannel journey – your business structure is irrelevant to them. They want a holistic, connected and smooth journey that meets their needs from start to finish. And you need to be able to adapt accordingly.

To demonstrate how an individual customer’s journey culminates into his or her likelihood to return to your site to make another purchase, let me contrast two recent personal retail experiences as a busy working mom.

Experience #1: Women’s online retailer
I need some casual boots, a winter coat and a few blouses.

I visit well-advertised website for women’s fashions that promises great finds on unique and well-priced items.

Website is fast. Filters work well. Product images look great. Prices are good. Check. Check. Check.

Smooth sailing through the checkout. Shipping is about $65 on an order of about $500 but prices are good, boots and coats are likely heavy/bulky items so I make the purchase. Items are supposed to arrive within the week.

A week passes. An email says the boots are on their way. No word on other items.

Shortly after, boots come with the blouses. Boots in the expected shoe box, blouses come in small plastic bags.

Moment of truth: one pair of boots I love. Just like the picture, fit great. Other pair—well….really cheap material and not terribly well made. Blouses are not well made. What are my return options?

I email the customer service link but get no response-a couple of times. Finally someone responds: I have to wait for the whole order to arrive (where IS that winter coat BTW??) before I can send anything back. Hmm.

Three-and-a-half weeks from the time I order, the coat arrives. Sigh. It is definitely the item in the website photos but the quality of the materials and workmanship are awful.

Now that I have all items in hand, how can I return the unwanted items? One pair of boots are worth keeping from the whole order. Well, turns out I can only return the coat since I have now had the other items for more than two weeks. WHAT?

OK, what is it going to cost me to send the coat back? The full initial $65 delivery fee. For 1 of the 6 items I was charged shipping for. Seriously.

After that experience, I’m a little gun-shy. But life is busy and shopping online is such a promise of convenience….

Experience #2: Boy’s online retailer
I have a formal “quinceaños” event to go to. I get my school-aged son to try on the suit he wore to the last formal event we went to. (LOL wishful thinking—time for a new suit.)

I really DO NOT HAVE TIME to shop for a suit. I take a chance—Google a site that sells boys’ suits. I’m a bit skeptical about fit but I’m short on time.

I go to the site. It’s fast. Filters help me find something that looks good. Images look convincing. What about size? I take my son’s measurements, compare to the online size chart and am ready to order.

It’s a Sunday night. The event is Saturday. Yikes.

SUPPOSEDLY orders entered by noon are processed by end of the day – but it’s Sunday. Shipping options are not free—I opt for $18 two-day shipping on a $300 order. If I am lucky, I will get the order by late Wednesday, early Thursday. That gives me time to hem the pants. I take the plunge and order without incident.

Tuesday at 11 AM the suit arrives. WHAT?

I open the box. Suit is in a proper suit bag, laid carefully in the box with tissue paper. The shirt is wrapped in tissue, tied with ribbon. There is a printed receipt for “hassle free return” and a THANK YOU CARD???? This is too good to be true.

I open the suit bag—PLEASE let the suit be decent.

It’s beautiful. Color is nice, suiting material good quality, neat stitching, has a modern cut. Size looks about right—I’ll have to do the hemming I was expecting.

There is NO WAY I am returning this but I am curious. What does the receipt say about the return process? Just check the items you are returning, sign the bottom of the receipt. Tape the box back up and drop it at the local post office (around the corner).

Thinking of my journey with these two retailers, here’s how I would sum up my thought process:

Am I willing to try those retail sites again?

Both sites were fast.

Filters were great.

Images loaded and looked nice.

No checkout problems whatsoever.

Websites were both great.

Women’s Retailer: Sorry.

These guys lost me at waiting in limbo for my full LATE delivery to arrive before I could return items. There is nothing they could improve on their website that would make me TRUST them again.

Boys’ Retailer: I’m not thinking about the website.

What sticks out in my mind is the promise kept of the product I bought, delivered BEFORE the estimated time when there was no time to spare. I think about the CARE that went into packaging that suit and the thought that went into the easy return process I didn’t opt for. These guys nailed it.

And stats from the eCommerce Packaging Study 2016 from Dotcom Distribution bear out this experience. When it comes to trust, a key element in the e-commerce journey, the website experience is not the lever to pull:

The same study found that 87% of shoppers said the time it took to receive an order would influence their decision to shop with a retailer again. 47% chose NOT to return to a retailer because of unclear order status and updates.

What does all this mean for you?
Ignore site speed and stability? Forget about the clunky filters? Live with checkout errors?

No. All of those elements are critical to a smooth website experience. But they are table stakes in a customer journey that regularly crosses both physical and digital channels.

If you really want to WOW your customers and keep them coming back, do everything you can to make the entire customer journey one YOU would want to take. The goal should be to make the whole experience productive, easy and enjoyable regardless of how or where your customer interacts with you.

The key is listening to your VoC across all channels to identify the high stakes issues that make or break customer TRUST, wherever they occur.

Collaborate with others to take connected, coordinated action – work as a TEAM to break down company silos and smooth out the rough spots in the journey.

Keep listening to VoC feedback across all digital and non-digital interaction points in the same connected manner you take action on it to see if reports of problems are decreasing and where your ratings are improving.

Monitor your return visits, online sales and customer lifetime value as you make improvements across the journey to assess ROI.

Then rinse and repeat.

Are you guilty of creating disconnected customer journeys and experiences? Find out with the OpinionLab Strategy Guide “10 signs you’re guilty of disconnected customer listening”.

When in comes to prospecting, many people have the problem of running out of creative ways to stay in touch with people.  I want to show you endless creative ways to get attention and stay in front of people and keep making yourself known.  You must have lots of varied ways to continue to prospect the same people.  There are many ways once you commit, but you have to get all in on it.  I’ve said this a thousand times, but creativity follows commitment.  If you’re not finding yourself very creative right now, you have a commitment problem. 

There is no protocol or etiquette for you to follow here—the only wrong thing for you to do is not follow up and quit prospecting.  Here’s how to have creative variety in your prospecting:

1.Your Power Base—Make a call to your power base. I’m talking about friends, family, customers, school mates, past employers, and past relations. Everyone has a power base. A guy who beat me up years ago is on that list. Just because he beat me up when I was 18 doesn’t mean he won’t buy a product from me 20 years later. Even enemies are part of my existing power base.

A power base is not something that stays one size. Throughout your life, it should have expanded bigger. I know people who have just 3 friends. You should have thousands of friends. Your power base will grow or cease to grow depending on how much attention you give it. Remember your power base has the word “power” in it—because it gives you power. You want to grow it and increase the quality of it as time goes on.

The place to start is with what you have.

Direct marketing companies and MLM’s are unbelievably effective because they depend solely on using and utilizing people’s power bases. Combine dedicated and relentless contact of power bases with lots of people, with great products, and you create a very profitable company during any economy. Mary Kay, Nu Skin, Herbalife—I can go on and on—are just a few examples of companies in which their entire model is based on one concept, power base.

When you activate your power base you’re going to find people you’ve forgotten about that are qualified and interested in buying your product. Make a list of everyone you’d consider in your power base if you haven’t already made the list. You need to put your list in a file or on a CRM, and then you need to make the calls. The purpose of the call is not to sell, but to reconnect, reenergize, and reactivate.

Your list can sit there ignored, but it’s still sitting there. The fact that you aren’t working that gold mine does not mean it’s less valuable. I can go climb into the mine that you abandoned and pull gold out. Don’t miss out on potential sales.

2.Service Customers—Customers who are currently getting serviced with your firm whether you sold them or not are a great opportunity. Most people see service customers only as service customers rather than how I see them—future prospects. The customer who comes in for a watch repair wanting a new band on it, many salespeople see them just as band buyers rather than a watch buyer. The customer who comes in for a watch repair is a watch buyer but nobody ever contacts them. Same thing for a guy in the tailoring department, he’s a suit buyer.

Businesses don’t put much emphasis on service customers because they are too dependent on mass advertising and marketing. Prospecting got lost as a priority when we got into the information age with TV and telecommunications. For me, service customers are a great source of new contacts. All problems are opportunities to solve problems. Money follows solutions. Get a copy of every service or repair order for your company. You want to stay in contact with your customer through service. Get out of obscurity, get attention, be of service, and make a contact. 

3.Reactivating Sold Customers—Regardless if you haven’t spoken to John who you sold to 9 months ago, you can reactivate by using a call, a letter, an email, a text, a video, or a personal visit. If you can’t call the people who have paid you, you’re in trouble. You’re making life hard by not following people back up. Make at least 10 calls each day to past customers, whether they bought 3 weeks ago, 6 months ago, or 3 years ago. The purpose of this call is not to get out of obscurity, the purpose is to get them thinking about you again.

Your two problems are obscurity and people not thinking about you. People may know you but have forgotten about you. This is why you need to remind people you’re there and you are here to serve still. Make sure you update during the call all information with them, Twitter, Facebook, what they are doing and where they are in the buying cycle—get any useful information you can get. Then you want to set up a personal visit and get referrals if possible.

Handle any problems that come up in the call as an opportunity.  Be sure and tell the client when the next time is you’ll be contacting them—always commit to another call. Knowledge is power, so get as much data as you can in this call.

4.Converting the Unsold—Go through all the people you’ve worked with and not sold. The fact that you didn’t close them doesn’t mean you give up on them. Old is still gold, just because you left the gold mine doesn’t mean it’s not still there. Maybe 6 months ago they couldn’t afford it, they weren’t quite ready, or had to delay purchasing for some other thing they were doing.

There are a lot of things you want to leave in the past, but don’t leave the unsold. Persist and don’t give up too early. It might take 5 calls to close someone and you gave up after 3.

I’ve just given you 4 different ways you can begin prospecting today: calling on the unsold, the sold, service customers, and your power base. Commit to prospecting today and you’ll begin to increase your income.

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These are all great ways to invest in yourself and increase your revenue. Get them before the deal ends.

Be great,

GC

As sales executives, it’s easy to spend all of your time focused on the number, while neglecting the process that will get you there. But, the smartest sales leaders know that “providing the how” and developing a process for consistently coaching their reps is one of the fastest paths to meeting revenue goals.

Two of the most overlooked essential skills are listening and questioning. While these may seem like easy skills to master, they’re often the reason why many opportunities don’t move forward.

The Importance of Listening Skills

Ask buyers what their biggest complaint is about salespeople and they’ll often say it’s that they don’t listen. This grievance often comes from interactions with too many reps who focus too much on what they’re selling and not the problems they’re solving. We call that situation the Seller Deficit Disorder, there are five symptoms:

• Your potential buyers don’t think you understand their pain
• You have limited access within the buyer’s organization
• Your solution is perceived as too expensive
• Your prospect has difficulty distinguishing between competitive offerings
• The value you provide is not clearly articulated

Ineffective listening is at the core of this disorder. The best salespeople always take the time to listen to their prospects and build a comprehensive understanding of their business. Once sales reps take the time to listen, they can start using the prospect’s answers to frame the customer conversation.

Remember, great salespeople should always be listening for two things – quantified business pain or the triggers that give them openings to ask more probing questions. Effective listening gives you the right to move the conversation forward. Probing questions can seem forced if you don’t relate them to the current conversation.

The Importance of Questioning Skills

Deals are won and lost on discovery. If your reps don’t have the ability to ask great questions, they’ll never be able to uncover the business pain that leads to higher level sales conversations. A great discovery process enables the salesperson to effectively understand what a prospect is trying to accomplish, and helps the salesperson lead them to what’s required to get there. How do you structure a great discovery process? Here’s some best practices to share with your sellers:

Start Broad And Keep It Specific

Begin the conversation by warming up your prospects by learning more about their organization and their specific processes.

Move To The Positive

After building an understanding of the organization’s processes, move on to what’s working well and what they want to build on.

Pivot To The Negative

Then dig into what’s not working or what could be functioning better. This is the business need your solution should be focused on solving.

Identify The Key Stakeholders

Ask about other people within the organization that are involved in these areas and how their processes would be affected by any potential solutions.

Keep The Conversation Going

Continue building on the investigation into the business issues. Learn more about what’s causing the problems, who’s involved, what’s been tried before and what success would look like.

How Sales Reps Get The Most Value From Mastering These Skills

Using listening and questioning during the sales discovery conversation helps salespeople ensure they’re only pursuing qualified opportunities. As they go through the sales discovery process, these conversations get them access to other people within the organization and gives them a comprehensive look at the different perspectives that play into the business need.

Establish Your Credibility

Successful sales reps will use the information they gather during the process to build their credibility. By actively listening and questioning, salespeople can use the information their prospects are giving them to align the solutions they’re selling with the organization’s biggest business challenges. The credibility empowers the sales reps to continue their sales conversation.

Are you ready to transform your sales management? Learn how to improve your sales leadership with our new eBook, “A Sales Leader’s Guide to Enabling Front-Line Managers.” Download your free eBook now!

No one would argue that leads are the life line to the growth of any business. But I suspect sales would be the first to object to the idea that all leads are good leads. Their support for this perspective is quite simple – If a lead isn’t in the market to buy now (or within a pre-defined sales cycle), then the lead isn’t going to have a personal monetary benefit, nor will they contribute to the monthly sales goal. Sales survives in the present tense. However, from a marketing perspective, all leads “could” eventually turn into a good lead if we simply abandon the “one-size-fits-all’ approach. This is marketing’s opportunity to develop a strategic lead gen plan that organizes leads into segments based on their “sales readiness” – tracking leads by 3 distinct segments:

Early Pre-Purchase Stage– may have some awareness regarding your product or service category but not likely to engage, other than general learning

Mid Pre-Purchase Stage- feeling some stress, and beginning to research options/solutions within your category without urgency

Late Purchase-Ready Stage– feeling stress, and actively researching options/solutions with urgency

There’s a more strategic reason for segmenting with the above approach, beyond the obvious. By establishing a strategy and plan to manage leads at all stages, your paid media dollars will be significantly stretched. Meaning that although a lead may not be ready to buy today, the cost of nurturing a lead until the time they ARE ready to buy will significantly decrease and generate a greater return on marketing investment.

Here’s Why: Lead databases and marketing automation platforms, if configured correctly, will convert a percentage of the mid and early stage leads over time. Put in financial terms, with the aid of technological support, businesses can convert a marketing dollar from a “one and done” allocation to a dollar with a shelf life that can last several months or even years.

Marketing Pays for Itself: There’s a trick to this approach- the power of automation is only as good as your pre-programmed communication strategies. This is where marketing should apply their strategic prowess – by building multi-touch communication streams designed to move early stage leads to mid-stage, and mid-stage leads to late stage, by leveraging content that’s purposefully developed to accelerate each segment to move to the next stage in their purchasing journey. Below is a high-level summary road map, illustrating two touches designed to move leads through the process (Review Other Contact Strategies):

The power of lead generation requires a well thought out plan that’s orchestrated, where every component of the plan serves a distinct purpose. From a sales point of view, lead volume will only have value if they’re ready to buy. From a financial and operational point of view, if that volume can be cultivated into predictable sales over time, marketing has moved themselves from a cost center to a predictable revenue contributor.

When it comes to purchasing new products or services for a company, an abundance of thought goes into the process. As a marketer, how does one tap into that process to get to the nuts and bolts of what a consumer is trying to do? It begins with where they buy, how they buy, and who they buy from. More than likely, the consumer is going to go to a vendor they trust. To build that trust vendors have to break down the buying process and see exactly how the consumer consumes.

Business-to-business relationships focus on industry-specific needs and provide tools and services to make businesses more efficient and cost effective. Choosing the right product to achieve those goals is a testament to the evaluation skills purchasing agents have to assess what their company needs and then appraising what’s available in the market. Whether it’s new financial software, HR training materials, data recovery services, and much more, the decision-maker has a heavy task of picking what’s the right fit for their requests. That’s why the buying process always begins with:

Addressing a Need or Pain

A consumer is going to be shopping for a new product when they have a want or a need to satisfy. Timing such an opportunity is a task for the market. Sometimes it’s reflective of a business trend that’s becoming more popular, growth in the consumer’s company or industry, or the replacement of outdated or broken equipment. This provides the marketer with the advantage of servicing that particular need. The scenarios listed will encourage a consumer to go shopping, but what really drives a profitable buying process is for the marketer to target consumers and pinpointing their needs even before they’re aware of them.

To do this, the vendor must have a strong knowledge of their client-base. Locking in new customers by targeting a brand specifically to a chosen market is a successful way of assessing a want or need. But the most satisfying results are by building a dedicated client base. Lasting relationships with existing clients will allow the marketer to know when their clients are ready to buy and prevent them from seeking products from competitors. Which leads us to:

Evaluating the possibilities

Everyone wants to get the most ‘bang for their buck’. Cost and quality are two key components consumers gauge when they’re going through the buying process. They want a product that meets their budgetary needs but also provides solid results. Providing feature sheets and blogging about the content of their products, marketers can instruct consumers on what they have to offer. Tutorial videos and utilizing social media are also keen ways to show off a product in this current marketplace.

What vendors aim for is ‘selling without selling’. Consumers want education; they want to make a knowledgeable decision about what they’re purchasing without feeling coerced or bullied. By reaching out to their consumers on a regular basis, by building those relationships, marketers can better understand what their clients are looking for. They become part of the buying process by being available, informative, and consistently aware of what their clients need. Consumers are going to shop. They’re going to compare what’s in the market without making a decision on the first thing they see. But by having a time-honored bond with their clients, marketers will see more sales. Consumers value those traditional connections, the reputations they’ve garnered with each other, and the time both have invested in their association.

Post-Purchasing Assessment

Equally important is the considerate follow-up made post-purchase. A client’s well-being is first and foremost in any vendor’s mind. Whether they’re assisting with training and implementation on the new product or not, any merchant worth their salt will ensure their customers are having a fruitful experience with their product.

Such a follow-up can be a simple phone call or email, touching base and checking in. A survey asking for feedback on a consumer’s experience and use of the product is also helpful. Receiving testimonials is a brilliant way to market a product in the future. If the vendor is assisting with training/implementation, be sure to have a dedicated consultant doing the work who is readily available for instructional sessions, meets deadlines, and readily answers any questions the client may have. Resuming a calendar of client reach-outs will also bolster the relationship the marketer has already established, and now a new product is in the client’s use, these regular reach-outs will give the vendor an opportunity to see if everything is fitting all of the client’s needs.

The buying process for any business is a tried-and-true experience for a vendor. It takes a nurturing manner where all parties communicate what they’re looking for and the best method to go about meeting those needs. Providing a quality, cost-effective purchase to a client will build the reputation of a vendor like no other marketing tool. Successful word-of-mouth and cultivation of a relationship are both outstanding and necessary to shine in competitive industries. Any consumer would be delighted to continue such a fruitful association.

With the frequent modifications happening in different search engine algorithms today, off-site SEO is going to be more competitive and harder in the future. Together with the emergence of these developments in search algorithms and their deployment, behaviors of search users will tend to develop and change too, making online marketing landscape all the more competitive, particularly when it comes to link building. Link building plays a crucial role in boosting your website’s ranking in SERPs. While obtaining top quality backlinks to your website is of great importance, the job is easier said than done. In this post, we’ve jotted down 11 innovative techniques that you can use to obtain high-quality backlinks to your website.

Check Your Brand Mentions

This is a fairly useful link building technique that you can implement if your business is a renowned name in the industry, or your website has got some amount of popularity in its niche. This advanced SEO strategy helps you to obtain lots of top quality links, thus making your website rank better in SERPs. The fundamental goal of executing this technique is to identify unlinked mentions of your website, your brand name, your name on the web and converting them into links. With the help of tools like Google Search, Google Alerts, Ahrefs Alerts etc, you can implement this method. First, you need to set up a browser or email notifications to identify whenever your selected keywords (for example, your brand name) are mentioned and when you get a new mention, you would need to check that out.

Give Out Testimonials in Exchange for Links

Another way you can leverage your business’s existing authority or popularity in your niche is by giving out testimonials to other sites in exchange for their links to your website. By executing this method, you can place lots of links of renowned companies and services in the SEO domain such as Advanced Web Rankings and Ahrefs while placing your brand name on their front pages or testimonials pages. Providing testimonials for SEO marketers together with your own link will most likely make them link back to your site.

Get Interviewed on site/podcast

The emergence of podcasting, particularly the interview format, can be extremely beneficial for links and exposure. Simply put, podcasters require a continual supply of guests and in case you’re adept in your field and your opinion adds value to the audience, they would be happy to have you onboard. This can be a highly useful way to obtain citations to your front-page, your most valuable articles and your opt-in content when your links appear in show notes. First, you need to find some top quality sites that are relevant to your field and then go through the pattern of their content, their quality, style, and target audience. If you find a prospective interview opportunity, send them gentle messages or emails to pitch the idea. If you receive a positive response, get prepared for the interview.

Get featured on Link Roundups

Link roundups are fresh and the most valuable curated content developed by industry publishers and content developers that get published at regular intervals. Unlike other content creators whom you can pitch for the inclusion of your content, link roundup creators continually search for great and valuable content to include in their list. In reality, it’s quite difficult to consistently generate link roundups in your field because you need to continuously keep looking for valuable content on the web. Or else, visitors of regular link roundups may not come back again. But here, you’re offering them a favor by providing your own high-quality content. Pitching to the link roundup curators is much like other outreach campaigns. The first thing you would need to get featured in link roundups is to find their contact information on their blogs or company websites. Secondly, you need to send them customized emails and finally, develop a good relation so that they open your emails and you get responses.

Re-engage Domains that removed your content

There are many domains in which your earlier backlinks are lost or deleted by the webmasters, based on their preferences. This can be done in two ways – either the webmasters removed your link, or the links were replaced by another source of content. However, you can recover your removed backlinks by reaching out to the webmasters and asking if your links can be added back to their previous position or whether they can give you a backlink from a different page. You can use Ahrefs to identify the websites from where your backlinks are removed. Once you’re done, you can find the contact details of the webmasters and start communicating with them.

Get links from YouTube

Backlinks from YouTube are a good source of website traffic and you too can leverage that. In case you have a blog, you can plan to obtain targeted traffic to boost your SERP rankings. Not all but only certain niches can leverage this method. Niches such as Bizarre, Gaming, Technology, Fun, Education, Science etc. can be successful by executing this technique. The key thing behind such success is the fact that YouTubers aim to get views as much as a blogger wants traffic. You need to ask YouTubers to link their videos to your blog post and in exchange, you would embed their video on the blog post. Ideally, you should develop a list of 10-15 articles and find YouTube videos that can link back to them. Next, find the contact info of the video creator or channel behind the video and reach out to them to seal the deal and get backlinks.

HARO

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is one of the most useful ways to get high-quality backlinks from various authority news sites. In this method, reporters seek help regarding their articles. You need to subscribe to the requests and go through them daily to identify the most relevant articles to your website. Then, you need to aid them to obtain a link that comes back to your site. If you go with the free service of HARO, this might seem to be a daunting task but if you can actually help them, you can effortlessly obtain trusted links within a short time frame.

Fix Broken Links

As your website ages over time and undergoes various content changes/redesigns/branding changes etc, broken links are simply unavoidable. If you can succeed in your broken link building endeavor, there will be much better results awaiting you from it in terms of getting links from renowned sites in your field on your aged yet powerful web pages. If you fail to monitor the links, they might become broken even before they’re on board. That’s why it makes sense to concentrate on your broken link building strategy. With the help of tools like Ahrefs’ Outgoing Broken Links Checker and Incoming Broken Links Checker, you can generate a report that contains a list of your broken backlinks and then contact the respective websites to notify them about potential replacements.

Create Linkable Content

According to Google, two of its highest ranking parameters are content and links. Content provides undeniable value when it comes to surviving in today’s digital marketing era. It’s important to note that your content has to serve a purpose regardless of the nature of your industry. It should generate leads, increase brand awareness, boost sales – in short, make an impact on your target audience, increase search engine rankings and trigger reactions. If your content fails to fulfill these goals, all your efforts would simply go in vain. Content and links share a symbolic relationship – valuable and engaging content attracts links and which enhance the popularity and visibility of your content. More importantly, it’s never enough to just develop your content. Therefore, you need to have a link strategy in place. For creating linkable content, the most important thing is to understand why visitors link back to specific content on the web and what type of content would get them interested in linking back to your content.

Conclusion

The SEO world has evolved greatly over the last couple of years and the old school methods are no longer useful today. Back then, methods like keyword stuffing, low-quality spun articles, spammy backlinks etc. worked significantly in increasing website traffic but all these are now disregarded. These days, quality backlinks from authority sites play a major role when it comes to enhancing your site’s authority. But it’s quite an uphill task for a website page to attain high SERP ranking without having contextually relevant backlinks pointing back to the domain or the landing page. Are you continually striving to obtain high-quality backlinks through the old methods? If yes, try these creative link building techniques as mentioned above to boost your website traffic and authority.

Let me guess: you’re managing a business and wish to rake in more profits than you’re currently doing. But there’s a little problem: you haven’t gotten to wrap your head around increasing sales.

Chances are also high that you’ve learned and used persuasive online marketing techniques that haven’t made much of an impact; persuasive techniques such as:

Creating Urgency

Portraying a product’s availability as bound by a time frame, thereby inciting FOMO – fear of missing out – in the minds of prospects, so as to make them waste no time in purchasing

Creating Scarcity:

Making it seem as though a product is limited in supply and only early-birds would have the opportunity to enjoy it.

Mind you, these and similar psychological hacks do work, but they aren’t silver bullets in themselves. So, when you can’t have any more of persuasive techniques that have proven ineffective in a context, you need to try something different. This article will show you four ways to sell more by using less EXPLICIT persuasion. They are:

1. Be Loved:

Allow me to digress a bit. Many years ago, political psychologists revealed that electorates tend to project their own attitudes onto candidates they like and project disagreeable attitudes onto candidates they dislike. Consequently, they (electorates) rationalize their voting decisions based on these projections. What does have to do with sales, you ask?

Well, it turns out that people tend to behave in similar ways when faced with situations that involve choosing from a set of alternatives. Similar to political behavior is the way by which people form conceptions (right or wrong) about businesses and use those conceptions to shape their behavior towards them.

fMRI neuro-imagery claims that emotions (experiences and personal feelings), rather than information (brand attributes, features and facts), are primarily used by customers when evaluating a brand. A study also states that the emotion of “likeability” is the measure most predictive of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales, a study revealed.

Thus, to increase sales in the long term, you’ve got to start thinking about how to endear your business to its prospects. I mean, let go for a second the desperation to hike sales overnight and discover how to become highly popular and likable.

In this age of online inbound marketing, one veritable way to gain the love and respect of prospects is by providing free value.

2. Portray Product Exclusiveness:

People buy luxury goods to look and feel good. As a smart marketer or a regular business person, you can capitalize on this emotion by making products seem exclusive. This is a psychological hack that has been proven to work.

TicketBud, in an article on how ticket sales can be maximized, termed this strategy as “getting more money by selling less”. It had this to say:

“Rather than honing all your efforts to selling all general admission tickets, why not advocate the sale of VIP or premium tickets? These tickets are typically limited and offer special promotions. By catering your focus to selling these tickets, you will generate more revenue by selling less. You’d be surprised at the number of people who would commit to buying a VIP seating. Buyers may find that the benefits of spending a little extra can guarantee an enhanced experience.”

3. Have a Watchword and Live by it.

Ever heard of ‘30 minutes or free’? Dominos is a typical example of a business that created a watchword and lived by it. Back in the day, this phrase was viewed as a good enough value proposition. Thus, even though Dominos did not make the best of pizzas when starting out, it was loved for keeping its word (and being unique), most of the time.

You can learn from Dominos that, to sell more, you should find a means to set yourself apart from the competition. What are some eye-popping values your business can offer? Think deep and make them a reality.

4. Personalize, Personalize!

By personalization, I don’t mean sending bulk emails that are customized to include the first name of individual recipients. I’m talking about real personalization, here.

I recently signed up for a free service on a website and forgot about it. Day’s passed by, then I got an email from a representative asking why I hadn’t logged in, and offering assistance if needed. It was so obvious that the email was meant for me particularly, and not a regular spam.

As you’d expect, the show of concern got me – soon I felt compelled to visit the site regularly.

My point: you’d be grabbing attention by being less aggressive about your marketing campaign and proving to prospective customers that you’re genuinely interested in catering to their specific needs.

Another great benefit of personalizing a prospect’s experience with your business is that it takes you a step towards being loved (remember bullet point 1?).

Wrap Up

Increasing sales doesn’t always have to be difficult. The problem lies with businesses that fail to understand the complexities behind consumer behavior.

While there are lots of psychological hacks that actually work in turbocharging sales, not all are right in certain contexts. You’ve got to study your prospects to determine what works for you.

In the fictional world of the video game Watch Dogs, you can play a hacktivist who takes over the central operating system of a futuristic, hyper-connected Chicago. With control over the city’s security system, you can spy on residents using surveillance cameras, intercept phone calls, and cripple the city’s critical infrastructure, unleashing a vicious cyberattack that brings the Windy City to its knees.

Watch Dogs is just a game, but it illustrates a possible “what if” scenario that could happen in today’s increasingly smart cities. Advancements in artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices have made it possible for cities to increase efficiencies across multiple services like public safety, transportation, water management and even healthcare.

An estimated 2.3 billion connected things will be used in smart cities this year, according to Gartner, Inc., the technology research and advisory company. That would represent a 42% increase in the number of connected devices since 2016. But the rise of digital connectivity also exposes a host of vulnerabilities cybercriminals are lining up to exploit.

On April 8, hackers set off 156 emergency sirens in Dallas, Texas, disrupting residents and overwhelming 911 operators throughout the day. The number of attacks on critical infrastructure jumped from under 200 in 2012 to almost 300 attacks in 2015. As smart cities move from concept to reality, securing their foundation will become a top priority to ensure the safety of our digitally connected communities.

Insight Center

Simply put, smart cities rely on interconnected devices to streamline and improve city services based on rich, real-time data. These systems combine hardware, software, and geospatial analytics to enhance municipal services and improve an area’s livability. Inexpensive sensors, for example, can reduce the energy wasted in street lights or regulate the flow of water to better preserve resources. Smart cities rely on accurate data in order to properly function. Information that has been tampered with can disrupt operations — and constituents’ lives — for days.

Several cities have adopted smart technologies, applying artificial intelligence to accelerate their transition into the future. In Barcelona, smart water meter technology helped the city save $58 million annually. In South Korea, one city cut building operating costs by 30% after implementing smart sensors to regulate water and electricity usage. With the global IoT footprint expected to surpass 50 billion connected devices by 2020, urban communities will need to strengthen existing cybersecurity protocols and disaster recovery methods to counter hackers searching for opportunities to wreak havoc.

As smart city infrastructure proliferates, the stakes for protecting these digital foundations will only get higher. While investment in smart technology has gone up, many of these innovations are deployed without robust testing and cybersecurity is often neglected.

For example, cities currently using a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, are particularly susceptible to frequent hacks due to poor security protocols. Though SCADA systems control large-scale processes and unify decentralized facilities, they lack cryptographic security and authentication factors. If a hacker targets a city’s SCADA system, they could threaten public health and safety, and shut down multiple city services from a single entry point.

Simple computer bugs can also cause significant glitches in control systems, leading to major technical problems for cities. Once hackers invade smart city control systems, they can send manipulated data to servers to exploit and crash entire data centers. This is how hackers gained access to an Illinois water utility control system in 2011, destroying a water pump that serviced 2,200 customers. Not only do these breaches disrupt daily operations for residents, they can be costly to remedy. A hypothetical hack that triggers a blackout in North America is estimated to leave 93 million people without power and could cost insurers anywhere from $21 billion to $71 billion in damages.

The inevitability of cyberattacks is a lesson the private sector has learned the hard way. As cities adopt smart initiatives, they’d be wise to make data security a priority from the outset. In addition to physically securing facilities controlling power, gas and water, city planners should also implement fail safes and manual overrides in all systems and networks. This includes forcibly shutting down potentially hacked systems until security experts have the opportunity to resolve vulnerability issues. Encrypting sensitive data and deploying network intrusion mechanisms that regularly scan for suspicious activity can also protect against hackers trying to breach control systems remotely.

Smart cities can increase productivity and efficiencies for citizens, but they have a serious problem when security is underestimated. As local governments pursue smart initiatives, realizing the full potential of these digitally connected communities starts with implementing cybersecurity best practices from the ground up.

For the uninitiated, Google has been slowly rolling out a variety of “search extensions” over the last several years in an effort to give searchers more information on the results page and increase their likelihood of clicking on an ad.

One of the latest extensions is called “Price Extensions”. Price extensions are exactly what they sound like – they give advertisers the ability to showcase prices (up to 3) within ad copy.

See an example here.

Is this a good thing? It depends on who you ask.

Google is a public company with a profit motive, so the move is an attempt (above all else) to increase clicks on ads, which is how they earn the majority of their money. If it does this, it’s a good thing for Google.

For searching shoppers and advertisers, the question is not so easy to answer.

To understand why, we have to think about the concept of pricing, and where it fits in the marketing or selling strategy. Price is an important lever that marketers have in order to increase demand for their products and services, but it is not the only one. That’s why you don’t see every company out there actively advertising their price. They advertise those things that make their offering unique.

When one advertiser in a market starts using price extensions to show their prices to searchers on Google, it may benefit them initially. But when their competitors start copying them, and all the ads show prices, the consequences could be dangerous. Suddenly, consumers are picking a company or product based on the prices listed in the ad instead of fully comparing the benefits that each offer.

Price becomes the one thing that consumers shop on (more so, in my opinion, than it is right now).

That favors the lowest priced competitor, obviously. The lowest price extension will get the most clicks, which may cause the higher priced products to consider lowering prices to match or beat, attracting more clicks.

This is a slippery slope for advertisers, who will feel pressure to “keep up” with lower prices and may adjust their offerings to match the need for a lower price. And this hurts consumers, who suddenly have worse options (cheaper options) to choose from.

Lower price does not mean better value. And I fear that price extensions, while they might be a short-term boon for Google, may do damage to the marketplaces they are used in most.

I remember sitting at my cubicle job looking at people wondering, “Why? Why are you here? Why are you doing this?” I asked a friend once, “Don’t you think this job is meaningless?”

He said no.

And then I knew what I had to do. I had to quit. And I did (eventually). First I spent time building up my own business on the side.

I don’t know if I’ve ever really believed in myself. I just knew I didn’t want the life I had. Sometimes believing in yourself just means you don’t believe in what you’re doing right now. And you have to change.

Sara Blakey felt this way, too. She woke up one day, looked at her life and said, “I’m in the wrong movie.” Now she’s a self-made billionaire entrepreneur.

But my friend Ryan Deiss said believing in yourself is possible. And I wanted to know more.

He started his first business in college. And made $100K in revenue the first year. He sold eBooks online. “I had books on pretty much any topic,” he said. One was about baby food. Then he partnered with mommy bloggers and sold it to their readers.

(That’s the formula for a great strategic partnership. Create something useful. Find someone with an untapped audience. Someone who’s talking to the people you want to talk to but who isn’t not offering what you have to offer.)

Now, years later, he’s the founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer. He’s a transformer. He teaches people how to build profitable online businesses.

He walked me through it. He told me about digital marketing. And how people use these skills everyday to start and grow their own businesses…

Here’s what he said:

A) Tell stories

I could tell you to buy something. Or I could tell you a story. I could tell you who threw milk into my best friend’s face while he cried for help. I could tell you how we survived. And the ways we bounced back.

“What wins today are the best storytellers,” Ryan said.

“How do you do that?” I asked. “How do you tell a good story?”

He said you have to start with a good product.

“Like what?”

“Anything,” he said. “Anything that is going to meet a felt need.”

We talked about dieting. Ten years ago, when people wanted to lose weight, they bought a pill. No one trusts that anymore. Now people buy hard exercise.

“You’ve got to evaluate where the market is today,” Ryan said. “What are people disregarding? What are they believing?”

“I’m a big fan of coming up with a statement of value,” he said.

“What do you mean by statement of value?”

He said this is key to becoming a good storyteller. Look at your product. And figure out how it’s going to take someone from their life today to a better life tomorrow. Then describe the product’s value.

“I make what’s called the before-and-after grid,” Ryan said.

Before: this is your customer’s emotional state, what their average day is like, what they’re struggling with, what they want in their life, and so on.

“You’re expressing empathy,” he said.

That’s one of the qualities Ryan hires for.

“Define empathy.”

“It’s being aware of others’ emotional states, having enough understanding of how they feel right now, and caring enough to respond accordingly.”

When you evaluate the market, you’re looking to understand where people are today. You empathize. Then you move into storytelling. You tell the story of how you can make their lives better. That’s the “after” state.

“All marketing ever does is articulate that shift,” he said. “You have to have the best product, and you’ve got to be the best at explaining what you do… at articulating your value, so people say, ‘Holy crap, I get it and I want it.’”

A good product can help people. It can help you. It can help your family and total strangers halfway around the world. If you have an idea, you have to take the first step. That’s what I learned from Ryan.

There are a lot of people with ideas. But a lot of people are also afraid to start.

So I asked Ryan, “What’s the first step?”

“You’ve got to believe in it,” he said. “Sometimes you’re just delusional. On the other end of the spectrum, there are so many people sitting there right now listening to this with some amazingly great ideas, but they don’t believe in themselves.”

I interrupted. “What can they do? What’s the first step in having belief in yourself?”

He laughed. “You’re the expert when it comes to choosing yourself, right? Far be it for me to throw out too much here.”

“It’s hard for everybody,” I said.

We did another podcast on this. (It comes out today.) Because millions of people have ideas that never escape their imagination. They go on unborn. That’s painful. If you’ve ever hidden your dreams, you know how hard it is. It feels like you’re lying all the time.

It’s hard to believe in yourself.

But it’s harder not too…

Choose for yourself. College or not. Employee or employer.

That’s the first step.

But if you want help, I trust Ryan. He’s been building businesses for 20 years. He knows how to execute. He knows how to start and grow online business and earn multiple streams of income.

He knows how to believe…  And he can teach you, too.

“At the end of the day, put something out there,” he said. “Put a product out there. Put an idea out there. Put a book out there. Write a blog post, right? If it get traction, then it’s good… It should be seen.”

Learn more from Ryan here.

The post How to Believe in Your Idea Enough to Take the First Step (and Other Business Advice From Ryan Deiss) appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

According to Mintel, 70 percent of American consumers shop online. That means more than 200 million people have access to your digital footprint. I’m no mathematician, but when we are looking at things on that scale, I’d say it’s pretty important to not only be proud of your organization’s online presence, but also constantly creating new, interesting content online.

However, too many businesses are focused on growing their digital footprint as opposed to improving it. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one nonetheless. You can do a great job creating and sharing valuable content while still occupying a lackluster footprint. Sure it may have grown in sheer volume, but that just means you have more poor content out and about, representing your brand in a negative way.

Instead, focus on improving your business’ digital footprint. I’d suggest that you:

• Refresh poor or outdated content and create new content that is valuable.
• Distribute content that you truly want to have associated with your brand, and nothing else.
• Analyze what is working and what is not working in terms of engagement.

Do you see the difference between growing and improving now? Good. Here are some tips to help you follow through.

Creating [and Refreshing] Your Brand Content

Before doing anything, you need to define your content marketing strategy. When creating a well-defined content strategy, you must laser-focus on resolving the wants and needs of your target audience. Remember, it’s the wants and needs of your target audience — not the wants and needs of your organization.

Ask yourself, how does my business make a difference? Approach content marketing with the idea that you are in business to help people, then focus on what information you can share that truly helps and provides value.

The goal is to become an authority, or thought-leader, in your industry through the content you produce and share.

After a strategy is defined, in addition to the creation of new, high-quality content (and a lot of it!), work back through your brand’s messaging over the course of past few years. It is very important to have consistent messaging. You don’t want your prospects to see inconsistencies — they will be confused and it will lead to a negative user experience. Therefore, it is critical for you to be proud of all of the messaging on your website and social channels before distributing your content throughout the web and driving traffic back to your site. If you haven’t taken inventory of your brand’s content in the recent past, you might want to consider doing a full content audit to understand what’s working and what is not.

Distributing Your Brand Content

For that sake of this post, let’s say you’ve defined your content marketing strategy, tidied up your existing messaging, and began to create new, valuable content. Fantastic! The next step is to get it in front of your target audience.

The ways you distribute your content is even more important than the content itself, in many ways. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if your brand content is good or bad if no one is ever going to see it. And if no one sees it, then it was a waste of time.

“So, what distribution channels are out there?” Good question, but let’s try again.

“So, what distribution channels are right for my business?” Now we’re talking, because we’re talking about your business!

To properly identify the channels of content distribution that are best for your brand, it is wise to begin by analyzing your audience. Where do they spend time online? How to they find answers to their questions? What are their preferred methods of communication? As you begin answering these questions, your content channels will start to take form.

If you are just getting started with content creation and distribution, I’d suggest that you focus on one channel until you find a groove. Once you’ve nailed the nuances of that platform and successfully connected with your audience, it’s important to leverage multiple channels to generate optimal success. Channels such as email, paid and unpaid social (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc.), Youtube and other video players, online publications and podcasts.

My personal favorite method of content distribution is email. A lot of people may try to tell you that email is dead. Please don’t listen to those people anymore. Email is roughly responsible for one-third of all the content we consume. It is one of the fastest ways to increase your digital footprint, it is easily measurable, you have the ability to control the audience, and nearly everyone interacts with it to gather and share information.

Whichever channels you choose, make sure you give your audience the opportunity to share, follow, subscribe, and above all else, CONTACT YOU!

Analyzing Your Brand Content

“So, what’s next?” I’m glad you asked! I strongly encourage you to track all of your efforts to gather data. After you have a sizeable amount, it is time to interpret those results and draw conclusions. Leverage it to better understand your audience in an effort to learn more about what type of content they want to consume and how they want it served. For this step to be effective, you’ll need to have experimented with many different forms of content (written, videos, infographics, ebooks, podcasts, etc.) and delivery channels to gather appropriate data. Even after you’ve discovered what works best for your business, don’t be afraid to continue to try new things and challenge the status quo.

At the end of the day, there are many channels to choose from, but the important thing is that you’re proud of the content that you distribute throughout the channels you identify. It is much easier to improve your online footprint when it’s spearheaded by great content that your audience actually wants. That’s how you establish thought leadership and keep your brand top-of-mind.

Introduction

The controversy of which platform is better for B2B Marketing has been chewed over and over in the last years by marketers, entrepreneurs and bloggers.

For years, Linkedin has easily been the main ‘real’ player in the B2B Marketing space.

But lately, Facebook is focusing on improving their paid marketing campaigns and continue to develop new and innovative features appealing to B2B companies and marketers alike.

It is commonly thought that B2B Marketers should use LinkedIn first, which makes a lot of sense since LinkedIn is obviously a business network. But some marketers swear that Facebook is actually a better channel for B2B advertising. Although LinkedIn is still the platform of choice, Facebook is giving a decent fight and slowly becoming the first choice for more and more B2B Marketers.

This article takes a bit of a different approach from the dozens other wrangled ones out there when it comes to evaluating Facebook vs LinkedIn for B2B.

Facebook vs. Linkedin

LinkedIn has a large user base to tap into with more than 450 million users compared with 1.86 billion users on Facebook. Although not nearing Facebook user numbers – 94% of B2B Marketers still finds LinkedIn more reliable to use for distributing business related content.

The platform targeting capabilities are especially helpful if you plan on running an account-based marketing program, whereas it’s great for targeting people based on their job titles, employers, industry, seniority level etc.

Most B2B prospects are looking to LinkedIn for business opportunities, The Linkedin stage is set for sharing content that adds value to these prospects. Consider that the average decision maker reads 10 pieces of content before finalizing their purchase decision. Linkedin provides an opportunity to get in front of them at early stages of their buyer’s journey and help position your company as such that understands their challenges and can help them.

Engagement-wise, though it only accounts for about 2.5% of social shares of all content, Linkedin drives more than 25% of shares for content focused on B2B topics.

Advertising – wise, LinkedIn launched a conversion tracking pixel at the second half of 2016, making it possible to launch advertising campaigns and gauge your ad’s performance beyond impressions and clicks.

Facebook, on the other hand, has always been the premier social media platform for consumer goods and the more ‘fluffy’ verticals such as music,video and fashion. But when it came to leads, the focus was always consumers. Now, Facebook is opening its advertising and content to become more business oriented. It’s still quite a few steps behind LinkedIn, but it’s definitely becoming a force to be reckoned with. With its better targeting abilities, greater traffic volumes, better variety of ad types and cost effectiveness, and more efficient optimization algorithm, it’s no wonder advertisers believe it to be more efficient in terms of better Reach or CPA.

While Facebook seems like a network that’s separate from our work lives, it really isn’t. As with Linkedin, Facebook also offers a growing number of professional groups B2B companies can engage and position themselves in and are a great source for consulting and finding business related content and personal tips from industry influencers.

Settling the argument with an Inbound Marketing approach

The highly competitive game of ruling the world of B2B Marketing is always changing and evolving and the topic is generating endless conversations and opinion articles around the globe. But when looking at the issue from an Inbound Marketing perspective – one can come to an understanding that there wouldn’t and shouldn’t be just one ring carrier, but different rings for different needs and stages.

Enter: the Buyer’s Journey

In short, the Buyer’s Journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase. In order to generate quality B2B leads, a business should create relevant content for its audience with respect to their stage of the buyer’s journey.

Regardless of the platform, trying to sell to a prospect that doesn’t trust you by using direct response ads is a sure way to fail. You need to figure out what your prospects needs and challenges are and be there to add value when they are searching for it.

With this in mind, it’s a lot easier to evaluate each platform strengths and weaknesses when planning your B2B Marketing strategy. That means using LinkedIn and Facebook in conjunction. And using them in the right way for each stage.

Both platforms are a great fit for distributing TOFU (Top-of-Funnel) content.

Typical content used by Inbound Marketers at this stage is aimed to satisfy the need for general knowledge on a specific problem, without mentioning particular solutions or vendors. Creating eBooks and unique content offers and offering them as gated content in return for the prospects email address, is a great way for providing value and generating leads who are interested in learning from you.

Conclusion

Having a deep understanding of who you are marketing to (your buyer personas) and how they use these platforms at each stage of the buyer’s journey, will enable you to become more customer-centric in your marketing.

Instead of focusing on which platform is better for your marketing strategy, simply being aware of how and when to use each on the potential journey your prospects go through before they decide to buy from you can make a dramatic shift in your marketing strategy.

If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook.

Responding to customers sounds like one of the simpler components of a salesperson’s job, but there are actually many different factors that contribute to a rep’s ability to do it well. It’s not just about placating your customers; practicing proper responsiveness can help move your prospects through the sales cycle faster and improve the overall customer experience.

Be obsessive about organization

There’s a French term in the world of professional cooking called “mise-en-place.” Literally translated it means “putting into place,” and professional chefs use it to denote that they have all of their ingredients and equipment on hand for when they are ready to cook. That way, if something happens quickly, such as a dish about to burn, they don’t have to go scurrying for a solution and can respond instantly.

The same concept can apply in B2B sales. The more organized you are before an issue arises, the better equipped you’ll be to respond to it quickly and substantively. This includes having all of your data entry up to date and keeping your customer information segmented and easy to find.

Interact frequently at the top of the sales funnel

Of course B2B buyers need salespeople throughout their entire journey, but many salespeople underestimate the impact that they can have near the top of the buying funnel. This is the part of the process where buyers need a lot of information in order to make their decision, and they need it quickly. The faster you can be there to deliver value-added content and help them get what they need in order to proceed, the more likely it is they’ll come to view you as an integral resource they can trust. This can also help improve your sales and marketing alignment, which studies show can increase annual revenue growth by up to 20%.

Set aside dedicated time for correspondence

The daily to-do list for any B2B salesperson can look strikingly daunting at the beginning of every day: make cold calls, prospect through digital and social channels, prepare sales collateral and contracts, perform customer research, CRM data entry, completing coaching and professional development tasks, checking on the status of current accounts, and on and on. It’s understandable to feel like there isn’t enough time to engage in prospect correspondence, but it doesn’t make it any less necessary. Set aside a designated time in your schedule to focus only on responding to clients. Make it earlier in the day if possible so it won’t get pushed to another day when you are too busy.

Always keep learning and demonstrate your expertise

Making a commitment to responsiveness also means making a commitment to continual education — about both your customers, and your own company and industry. Responding quickly and accurately requires a certain level of expertise with the subject matter in question, and the more you know, the more reliably you’ll be able to accomplish this.

In a Harvard Business Review survey of 200 B2B buyers, 39% indicated that they were dissatisfied with the level of expertise about their industry or company shown by their salesperson. It’s clear that when customers have questions during the process they want fast answers that are right the first time. If you aren’t there to deliver them, they’ll start looking for someone who can.

Listen to what your customer is saying

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you leave a detailed voicemail for a friend or family member, asking them to locate some helpful information. Then you receive a return call a bit later asking what you need. You ask, “Did you listen to my voicemail?” And they reply, “No, I just saw you called and wanted to get back to you as soon as I could.” It’s a gesture that’s nice on the surface, but now you have to explain the situation again and wait longer for them to locate what you need.

When you respond to a customer you need to understand specifically what they need, and you can only achieve this through listening or reading closely. If you reply quickly but don’t have what they were hoping for, it isn’t really a substantive response at all.

Prioritize and ask for help

Whether you’re a responsive salesperson or not really comes down to whether or not you prioritize responsiveness appropriately. If you train yourself to make it a habit then it will naturally become an important part of your regular schedule. Responding to clients is a vital responsibility — when they are working on developing a relationship with you they want to hear from you. If you need to prioritize client responsiveness over something else, don’t be too proud to ask your colleagues or sales leaders for help, and be prepared to reciprocate when they need to do the same.

Have you been in this meeting? Your company announces its new growth target and it is bound to find those customers. And the new growth target? Eye-wateringly high. You need to establish a new B2B lead generation channel and you need one now. Luckily or unluckily for you, you are spoiled for choice. That means there are no easy decisions. It only raises a lot of questions.

Which channel is the best for B2B lead generation?

Which one is better for my business specifically? Should I focus on inbound marketing, for instance? The idea of customers coming to me without having to make desperate sales calls all day is super sexy. Or should I focus instead on outbound sales? The fact that I don’t have to sit around waiting for somebody to become interested in my services but instead I can go after my customers and see much faster ROI, sounds pretty appealing as well. Do I even have to pick one?

Before you decide on a course of action, let’s look at your options for a B2B lead generation channel a bit more closely:

• Friends and family

  Your personal and professional network is always a great place to start. After all, it’s the source of the warmest leads you can get. They will always listen to you and are often personally invested in your success. Of course, the flip side is that even the most popular people have a finite number of potential customers they are already intimately acquainted with.

• Conferences

  These are great because you have a huge number of potential buyers in one place. And you don’t even have to fight for a meeting with them. They are all there and available to talk to. This can be a great one-time shot in the arm for your lead pipeline but it is rather expensive and difficult to scale (Hubspot found that B2B businesses were spending 12% of their lead generation budget on trade shows but only getting 9% of their leads from there), compared to other sources of B2B leads.

• Partners

  If you are lucky enough to have a robust network of partners, they can be a great source of warm leads. Unfortunately, not every business is so lucky. If you are starting from scratch, it will be very difficult to build a partnership network. It is probably best for mature businesses which have strong brands and lots of resources.

• Paid ads

  PPC ads can be very powerful when you get your keyword targeting right, in a place where everyone is looking. And where is that place? Google of course with its nearly 80% of the global search market (sorry, Bing lovers, but it’s true). If you are selling a solid product or service (and you should), Google is the place to be. And because Google is the place to be, everyone else is there too. This means that this can be expensive to outbid people on your keywords at the best times (the keyword “insurance” costs over 50 dollars per click!) and can lead to very low ROI when you are just starting out. That said it can be a great way to position yourself against your competitors.

• Inbound (content+SEO)

  When done right, Inbound can create a deluge of leads for your funnel. You create a content strategy around your brand and the problems you are solving. By producing 10x content, you build your image as an expert in a certain field, bringing organic traffic to you and your website. You can then use lead nurturing and retargeting in order to convert inbound leads into paying customers. The advantage of inbound is that it compliments other B2B lead generation channels like outbound nicely.

  The downside is that inbound takes a while to set up and get right. That means a rather slow ROI but when it starts working, the leads roll in.

  

• Outbound sales

  This is probably the easiest B2B lead generation channel that you can set up. All it requires is an email account. Apart from that, the ROI is almost instant. It is possible to send an email one day, schedule a meeting the next, and close the sale right after that. And what is more, it’s predictable. When fully ramped up (which only takes a few months) you will be able to count on the fact that you will, for example, always get 5 new customers when you contact 400 people.

  It’s scalable too. What if you need more customers? Well, it is as simple as contacting more people. The simplicity of the method and the almost instant feedback makes it easy to test new targeting, markets, and value propositions.

So which B2B lead generation channel should I choose

If…

• This is your first B2B lead generation channel

  Outbound is the best way to go. It is super easy to start, you see the fastest ROI, and can quickly validate your product and the new markets you want to enter. It’s also the most predictable and sustainable channel out there, which is crucial for any new business that needs a dependable revenue stream.

  
  You will save a ton of time and see much better returns if you find a tool that combines all of the elements you need to start (prospect data + email automation + knowledge). It should come as no surprise to you to find that this tool is Growbots.

• You are already doing outbound sales

  Add an Inbound channel. The thing is that good content is incredibly useful for your outbound campaigns. You can include it in your outbound campaigns, providing more value for your prospects. Also, it can help bring a prospect who opened your email but didn’t convert, back to your brand. You then have a chance to add them to your inbound funnel and have another chance to sell to them.

  The stability that your outbound channel provides will give you the leeway to tinker with your inbound channel until it gets going. Once it gets going it will provide you with a steady stream of leads.

• You are already doing inbound marketing

  Then start an outbound channel ASAP. You will end up with better returns by combining these two, because you can use your inbound content to support your outbound campaigns. These two lead generation channels work together in a perfect harmony to ensure that you have a steady flow of leads in your pipeline.

Now’s the time to start a B2B lead generation channel for your company.

Want to kick off an outbound channel? You can read here about what you need to start.

Boosting your warm lead conversion rate is one of the best ways to hack your growth. Since most of the success of your sales pipeline depends on your conversion rate, just a small bump can make a huge difference in the overall success of your sales team. So if you are in a situation where you need to boost your team’s performance, your warm lead rate is a good place to start.

Of course, it is not as simple as snapping your fingers. I imagine a lot of you reading this have been devoting a lot of time to improve the effectiveness of your outbound campaigns with little to show for it. So the question is: how do you improve your conversion rate?

Your warm lead rate has a huge impact on your sales results

Warm lead rate: The percentage of people who respond positively to your initial outreach. Thanks to machine learning, our software is able to recognize your warm leads, saving you the hassle of personally going through and sorting each of the messages you receive from your campaign. (it also recognizes out of office replies, negative responses, and bounces)

Your warm lead conversion rate has probably the biggest impact on the final outcome of your outbound sales pipeline. Because of the early position that it has in the outbound equation, doubling your warm lead conversion rate essentially means that you will be able to double the number of customers you generate without having to change any other parts of your pipeline.

Boosting your conversion rate can sometimes be as simple as making small tweaks to your messaging. For instance, adding a bit of humor to your messages or a catchy gif to your follow-up can increase your positive response rate significantly, even to the point of doubling it.

A small change can make a big difference

Not only are these changes small but also they can double your campaign outcome without increasing its volume. That means you don’t need to hire any new people for your team or contact any more prospects to make more sales. If you are unconvinced, have a look at the outbound equation again. Enter the metrics specific to your pipeline and see what happens when you double your warm lead rate. You can do this easily with our outbound calculator.

While a humorous line can work in your favor, there are Double your warm leads by using personalizationa number of other factors that can have an influence on your warm lead rate. Before you try anything else, make sure you have applied all of the basic rules from our How to write a killer email campaign blog post. Once you have crossed those suggestions off your list, it is time to go to the next level by adding a personal touch.

Write a personal campaign

Making your campaign personal means a bit more than just putting the recipient’s name at the top of your message, but it does not require a major time commitment. Adding information that you have found on your prospects’ websites or LinkedIn profiles can go a long way toward making your prospect feel that you have taken more than a cursory interest in them and their company.

• • Showing that you did some research on a prospect signals that you are serious about doing business

    More than any other hack or tweak to improve your warm lead conversion rate, showing your research makes the biggest difference. It shows that you have devoted time and resources to learn about your recipient and that you haven’t simply included them in a catch all cold email blast.

  • Personalization is the best way of increasing results without increasing your campaign’s volume

    If you are on a starter package with a limited number of prospects, you want to focus on maximizing your conversion rate. The rise in warm leads that personalization brings is the best way to get more warm leads without needing to contact more people.

Here are some types of personal information that bring warm leads:

What kinds of information can be used to make your email personal? Almost anything you find about your prospect or their company. Here are some ideas of what you can glean from a few different courses:

• • Prospect’s LinkedIn profile:

    • title
    • job description, responsibilities
    • experience from previous companies
    • career path
    • interests
    • skills
    • mutual connections
    • his recent shares/blog posts

  • Twitter:

    • recent shares
    • who the prospect is following

  • Company LinkedIn profile:

    • company description
    • specialities
    • number of employees
    • company structure
    • job openings

  • Company website:

    • technologies they use
    • their customers (numbers, examples)
    • recent events/news
    • their product

The three ways in which you can include your research in your campaign

• • Manually

    You can go through your list of prospects and look for what information is available about each one of them. It is really time-consuming but you can be sure you will be able to find some information about everybody.

  • Semi-automatically

    This method involves looking for the same piece of information about each prospect. This has the advantage of being a lot faster since you always know what you’re looking for. It is also easier to measure how adding a specific type of personal information influences the success of your campaign; you can test which information brings the best results.

  • Automatically

    Using this method, you work backwards by deciding on a piece of information first and then searching for prospects that match the type of information you want when prospecting. To do this, look for patterns. For instance, does your ideal customer often use a specific technology? If so, then generate a list of prospects who use this technology and send them the same message.

Your message still looks as personalized as the messages that you send using the manual and semi-automatic methods since the personal information still matches the recipient. Despite that, it takes a lot less time.

At Growbots, we let our users search for prospects by technologies, and a number of other categories of information, so that you can use the automatic method when prospecting for your campaign. This is one of our favorite strategies that we use ourselves. You can see here how we ran a campaign focused on Marketo users:

Always personalize the beginning of your message

It only takes 3 seconds for your brain to register the first impression so it is important that you make it a good one. By including personal information in the first sentence of your message, you show that you are serious about providing value to your recipient’s specific situation and value is the primary factor our brain uses to form our first impressions.

This initial value impression will make your recipient much more receptive to what you have to say and tees up your pitch to convert your prospect into a warm lead. All you need is a piece of software that allows you to personalize at scale.

Regardless of in what way you add research to your campaign, it is important to be able to add custom fields to your mail merge campaign so that you can add personal elements automatically. Luckily for you, Growbots lets you use as many custom field as you want in your messages.

What you can expect

At Growbots, introducing personalization to our campaigns was an absolute game-changer. It basically allowed us to go from 200 to 400 demos per month without hiring any people or sending any more messages. These results have gone far beyond what we expected and we have never looked back. Now every message we send is personalized, no exceptions.

Now that you have doubled the number of warm leads you generate, it’s time to learn how to get the most out of them. Stay tuned for our next article where we will tell you the secret to turning warm leads into meetings.

Not paying enough attention to the metrics of your outbound pipeline is what prevents you and your team from doubling your sales. Your super hardworking, but actually barely scraping by, team. Unfortunately, we have come across far too many sales teams like this. You know you have to double your sales opportunities from last month.

But there is no more money to hire more people and you are desperately searching for some way to turn one team’s output into two. So you are left wondering: how can I hit my numbers with the same team I have now? Is there any way I can hack lead generation to reach my targets?

Optimizing your pipeline is the key to doubling your sales

Luckily for all of the harried sales team leaders, business developers, and lead generators out there’s a solution so simple, it has been right under your noses the entire time. Remember the outbound equation we spoke about in our previous post?

Paying attention to the individual components of that equation is the key to doubling your sales. When you maintain and improve the metrics that are a part of the equation, you will be able to double your sales team’s output without bringing on a single new member.

Effective pipeline optimization means constantly striving to improve every metric in your outbound equation. Of course, you have a higher probability of improving some metrics more than others. The important thing is to know which metrics you should maintain and which ones should be worked on to improve the final result. To find out which are which, let’s have a look at each part of the equation starting at the end to see, which ones have the biggest impact on your results.

Close rate – the number of sales qualified leads that end up as closed deals

Your sales team should always be striving to improve their close rate but it depends on three factors:

1. How good and competitive your product is

   No matter how good of a salesperson you are, you won’t be able to convince somebody to buy and stick with an uncompetitive product.

2. How skilled your sales reps are

   The reason why they are so valuable to you and why you pay them so much commission is because they are highly skilled professionals. The more skilled they are, the more deals they can close.

3. What sales supporting materials you have

   These can be case studies, competition comparisons, one-pagers, etc. They back up the claims of your salespeople with factual information and social proof (often more convincing than demonstrating value)

Attendance rate – the number of people who actually show up for your demos or meetings

You should ideally shot for 80% (because of course there will always be a few people who will miss a meeting). If you are starting with a lower number or see a drop, there are a couple quick fixes you can do:

1. Get an automatic meeting scheduler like Calendly

   Not only will it remove any friction while scheduling your meeting but it also will send automatic reminders. If you don’t think it is important, think about this: Our attendance rate jumped from 60% to 80% when we started using Calendly. It is the easiest way to get closer to doubling your sales.

2. Work harder on engaging your prospect before your meeting

   Just because you have scheduled a meeting, it doesn’t mean your work is done. Like with any relationship, you need to work to maintain contact. Among other things, you can keep your conversation going, connect on a personal rather than a business level, or introduce them to your CEO.

Persistence rate – the percentage of warm leads you persuade to have a meeting

Don’t fall into a trap of thinking that you can stop selling when you have a warm lead. Doubling your sales involves persistence at every step, but this is especially true once you have a warm lead. A warm lead represents somebody who is interested but that is it.

80% of leads take at least 5 points of contact before they say yes, yet 92% of salespeople give up after hearing no for the 5th time. Sometimes an initially enthusiastic warm lead will require 7 follow-ups before they agree on a meeting. So it is up to you and your team to be in the 8% of salespeople who are making 80% of the conversions. We have found that 45% is a good number to shoot for.

1. It is important to keep working until you get a clear yes or no answer to a meeting

   Someone’s attitude towards your product can be a fickle thing and you may need to hold their hand until you can book a meeting. If you don’t keep up with somebody, a formerly promising lead can slip through your fingers. Equally, a sceptical lead can be won over with a regular engagement

2. Create a database of templates that address different objections your prospects might have

   Remember, you want your team to double their results. By sending personal follow-ups based on a template, you can handle many more points of contact a day. By creating a central database of responses, the entire team can benefit from each template that is created, leading to much faster onboarding.

3. In the next few days, we will be publishing our guide on how to improve your persistence rate.

Warm lead rate – the number of positive or neutral replies you get

This is essentially the measure of how successful your outbound campaign has been. The better your campaign, the higher your warm lead rate.

1. Improving this metric can give you a lot of leverage over your results

   Because this metric comes so early in your pipeline, doubling it, say from 2% to 4%, will double the number of new customers you get.
   It means that instead of getting $10,000 in revenue at the end of your pipeline, you get $20,000!

2. Rewriting your campaign in a more interesting style can make a big impact on this metric

   Every little way that you can improve this metric will pay dividends at the end of your outbound sales pipeline. To double your sales, you need to be regularly testing new approaches to each metric to see how you can improve them.

3. In the next couple of days, we’ll publish our guide on how to automate outbound and increase the volume of your campaigns

Prospects contacted – The number of prospects you put into your outbound pipeline

This is the metric you have the most control over. Want more customers at the end of your pipeline? Then simply add more leads at the start.

1. The impact this metric has is similar to your warm lead rate

   Since this represents the start of your outbound pipeline, the effect of adding to this number will be felt in your results. In other words, doubling the number of prospects you add to your pipeline will double the number of customers you land.

2. Finding prospects manually is a thing of the past

   Automation tools are one of the easiest ways to multiply the output of your sales reps. The combination of prospect data and automatic sending tools, provided by platforms like Growbots, means that it only takes 30 minutes to do what used to take a rep a day. After adopting an automation tool, most of your rep’s day can be used to improve the other metrics in the outbound pipeline. The result? One sales rep can do the same amount of work that it takes three reps to do manually, getting you much closer to double your sales overall.

3. In the next couple of days, we’ll publish our guide on how to automate outbound and increase the volume of your campaigns

The result of good optimizing your outbound pipeline is doubling your sales output without adding to your sales team

You don’t need to invest in more people to double your output. Instead, manage your outbound pipeline, improve the necessary metrics, and see your outputs double. To keep track of your metrics and to see what improvements will mean to your results, check out our outbound calculator. By exercising good outbound pipeline management, you can increase the efficiency of your team without having to go through the expense and hassle of hiring, onboarding, and replacing new team members. Not only will you double your sales: you’ll be actually able to do it with the same people you have now.

And what are the two metrics with the biggest impact on your results? Prospects contacted and warm leads rate of course. In the next couple of days we’ll publish our guide on how to automate outbound and increase the volume of your campaigns!

You need an ICP for outbound

If you have spent even a little time thinking about what kind of customer you want to sell to, you have probably made an ideal customer profile or ICP. That’s great! ICPs provide a huge insight into who you want to target.

You can learn more about ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and get a template so you can make your own by checking out our article Ideal customer profile: How to make one

But think of your ICP like memorizing times tables in math class. The information is important but abstract. I mean when do you need to know what 13×4 is? On a test? No. You need it when you are in the store trying to figure out how much 4 bottles of table wine at $13 a pop, will cost for your next dinner party.

In the same way, the information you have in your ICP is essential to optimizing your outbound sales process. So how can you take the abstract information in your ICP and practically apply it to a successful outbound sales campaign? There are a few places where your ICP can be useful such as:

• Prospecting
• Qualifying leads
• Closing sales
• Providing support and upselling

Basically, your ICP will supercharge every part of the sales funnel. Pretty cool, eh? So how does it all work? Your ICP allows you to choose which customers you want to sell to. I know that sounds a bit worrying to somebody starting out. After all, you are trying to get as much revenue as you can. It would be counter-intuitive to try and limit the scope of the customers you want to attract. In our experience, that is not the case at all. Consider these points:

• You have a finite number of resources to pursue leads
• Every minute you spend selling to a dead end is a minute you could spend actually closing a deal
• Landing a good customer should give you the time and money to focus on improving your business

Does that convince you? Good, let’s get to work.

Prospecting

Let’s first start with the prospecting process. This is where you first start choosing who your customers are. Therefore it naturally lends itself to having a clearly defined ICP. After all, you are looking for customers who match the exact profile you have put together. Let’s think about how prospecting works. Your SDR searches for somebody who might want your product. So how do they know who to search for? That is where your ICP comes in. One of our SDRs Boris described it like this

We look at a company’s website and go down the list. Is the vertical good? Check. Does it have a wide scope? Check. It starts out as a list but after a few months, it just becomes intuition.

The process that Boris described hinges on the ICP. What is true is that you only get so much information from the website. To get more, check out a prospecting tool like ours which allows you to search by exact location, vertical, position, company, size, and technology used. Whichever way you find your prospects, try and compare the information you have with your ICP. For instance, one of our ICPs includes

• B2B SaaS companies in North America
• sized between 11 and 50 people

When we prospect, we are able to avoid putting resources into companies which don’t match these criteria. We can then just focus on finding the right companies to fit our ICP.

Once you have the prospect, you need to send them your outreach email. A good cold email explains how you can provide value to your potential customer. All of that comes from your ICP. Since you have targeted this customer based on a specific set of criteria, you can predict what kind of value you would provide them with. It makes writing your cold email a cinch and will increase the rate at which you get a positive response. As you can see, the ICP becomes more useful as you gain more information. So just think how useful it will be when you interact with your customer.

Qualifying leads

The process of qualifying leads is all about finding new information. Up until this point, you have had to go on the information that has been made public. A lot of this can be matched to the information that you have in your ICP, but these are the empirical qualities like the size of the company or the vertical that they operate in. When you qualify, you get to learn about some of the more subjective qualities that make an ideal customer. These include the intention to buy, the ability to make the purchase, and how demanding the customer is. These are all important factors to place in your ICP. After all, a perfect candidate who does not have the authority to purchase your product is not all that perfect.

Is it possible to target somebody who is not a decision maker and still have success?

Absolutely. There is a strategy whereby you get somebody interested in becoming an evangelist, who proselytizes to the decision makers in their company.

While you qualify your leads, you are positioning yourself for the sale. This is another chance to compare your red flags to the red flags found in your ICP. For instance, you can find out if the company has the funds or inclination to purchase your product. If one of your red flags is having to wait for funding, then this is the time to professionally disengage with the sale. Since you know who your ideal customer is, you can always restart the process in the future if the situation changes.

Speaking of which, this is the perfect opportunity to gauge if you arrived at a unique turning point that your product is ripe to exploit. As we have discussed, an ideal customer is not ideal forever. You might not be able to make a sale to a customer who is operating normally. When they are making or experiencing a change of some kind, you are then we take advantage of the situation.

Closing sales

Think of your ICP as a crib sheet on your customer. If you have positioned yourself correctly, matching information about your ICP with your customers up until this point in the process, you will find yourself in a strong position. The first point about this is that you should have the best possible lead you can have. You have spent your time up until now ensuring that the customer you are talking to is perfectly matched for your product. Just don’t forget though that there is usually after sales to think about. By comparing the customer who you are making a sale to to your ICP, you can evaluate what sort of problems to anticipate further down the line. You will also know what pain points you can alleviate for that particular customer and essentially what to pitch them on.

Providing support and upselling

Support is unique in that it is both a part of your product and part of your sales process. As always, you, ICP can come in handy for both functions. Since you have already anticipated the pain points that your customer faces, you have the opportunity to preempt then with targeted support. The other side of the coin is the sales role that your customer success team is engaged in. By predicting the needs of the customer, they can sharpen the point on the solution you provide. They can predict how your customer will respond in different situations and will be perfectly positioned to upsell when the time is right.

The beauty of knowing your customer

Your ICP is a result of data and intuition. Think of it as a tool to guide your outbound campaign, but don’t forget. It is a living document and will evolve as you get more information about your clients. So put together your ICP today. You can then use it as a framework for your next outbound campaign.

As authors, we often don’t spend enough time crafting our bios. Most of us write up a quick “about me” and never give it a second thought. There’s a problem with this tactic: it’s the wrong way to drive sales on Amazon and other sites.

If fact, as I look over author bios, you might be surprised how many are lackluster.  Sure, they talk about the author, but mostly about their hobbies, where they live, and how they like to pass the time (when they aren’t writing). If you feel like this describes your bio, then this article is for you! It’s time to make your Amazon bio into a killer sales driver on Amazon. Here’s how!

Is your Amazon Bio lackluster? Make it kickass with these tips! via @bookgal
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Start with an Outline and all Book Tie-ins:

Before you begin, create a list or an outline of anything that you’ve done related to the book. This can include research, work you’ve done in a related industry, accreditations, other books you’ve written, or awards you’ve won. You may want to include some of these pieces, but not all of them. The rest of these bullets will help you determine that.

It’s Not About You: Remember that while we started this focusing on you and your achievements, this bio really isn’t about you. It’s about your reader and knowing what your prospective audience is looking for. So let’s have a look at Mark Shaefer’s bio that I plucked from Amazon. His bio is keenly focused on his expertise as it relates to the book. So, having read Mark’s other books and seen him speak, I can tell you that he’s probably got a lot more he could have added to this, but he kept it short and relevant to the book.

Write in Third Person: When it comes to writing a bio, never use words like “I” and “me” because writing a bio in first person is an awkward read.

Show the Reader your Expertise:

Be Credible: There’s nothing wrong with being a first-time author, and when it comes to the credible portion of this Amazon bio you are working, or reworking, this may seem tricky. But remember this is where your initial work comes in. How long have you been writing? Did you utilize any special techniques or resources in this book?

How to write a kickass Amazon bio and sell more books! via @bookgal
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Check out Pete Ryan’s bio, he’s a first-time author but he leads this bio with his background as a journalist which tells the reader that he has some experience in book writing. Pete is also a marketing guy and has a successful business in So Cal, but you’ll notice he doesn’t even mention that, because it doesn’t really matter to his readers and Pete knows this.

Add in Keywords Particular to Amazon:

As I often say, keywords matter greatly on Amazon so if you’ve done your keyword research, add these to your Amazon bio, too. Now you don’t have to worry about re-working your book cover to include these keywords, this really only matters on Amazon. So how many should you include in your bio? Well, as many as you authentically can. Meaning don’t slam your bio full of keywords just for the sake of having them in there.

Why does this matter? Well I’ve talked about how Amazon is a search engine and, like a search engine, will spider your book page for keywords, so make sure at least one or two of the keywords you’ve found are in your bio.

Be personal (if appropriate): There’s a time and a place to write a personal-type bio. If you’ve written something that’s been a personal struggle for you, like maybe a memoir. J.D. Vance’s book (released in 2016) features a great example of a bio that’s a bit more personal. You’ll see he talks a bit less about his experience and more about his personal background, where he lives and his dogs.

Be funny (if appropriate): Be like what you wrote about – and that means if it’s funny, then be funny. Check out this bio from Karen Alpert, her book: I Heart My Little A-Holes: A bunch of holy-crap moments no one ever told you about parenting.

Short is the New Long: They days of long, winding bios that rival the length of your book are gone. Keep it short because while people do care who wrote the book, they don’t care enough to read paragraphs upon paragraphs about you. This is for your website, the foundation of your infrastructure, and where readers can go to learn even more about you!

Customize It & Change it Up: Is there something going on in the world that ties into your book? Then mention it, change up your bio. You can change up your Amazon bio as much as you want. And if you’re reading this and with a traditional publisher and thinking “they won’t let me change my bio!” trust me you don’t need your publisher to do this, just change it up in your Amazon Author Central Page and voila, done and done.

You should also modify your Amazon bio as you win awards, get more mentions, get some fab new reviews, for example: “The New York Times calls this book groundbreaking…” which you could easily add at the end of your bio to close it out.

Include a Call to Action & How Readers Can Find You: So, do you want your readers to take action somehow? Are you giving something away on your website? Or do you have an exclusive reader group that you want to invite readers to? Want them to join your newsletter? Then mention this in your bio. Also, be sure to add your website address so they can find you.

Sell more books with a kickass Amazon bio! Here’s how! via @bookgal
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So now, your Amazon bio is ready to rock. As an indie author, you’ll find that this is invaluable not only to your book marketing but also to your book sales. So, invest the time now and you’ll have something to build from as you publish more books. And, remember that bullet list? Keep it saved somewhere accessible, you never know when it will come in handy for future projects and books!

Want a bigger Amazon push?

We can help! Keywords and categories on Amazon are always changing, luckily for you we’re on top of it. Read more about recent changes here, and then check out our Amazon Optimization Package! And be sure to sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive discounts!

Have you come across social media statistics and do not know how to make use of it for your business?

It can be extremely helpful if you have not started benchmarking what you are doing on social media nor have identified your key performance indicators yet.

You can use the social media statistics as a tool.

However, like any other tool, it is only good if you know how to use it.

How to Use Any Social Media Statistics

1. Use it as a starting point for your business if you do not have anything solid, and available data related to your niche because you just simply don’t have time to find them.
2. Unless you are a data nerd, check only those that matter to your business and check the source/s as well if they are credible.

Metrics are for doing, not for staring. Never measure just because you can. Measure to learn. Measure to fix. ~ Stijn Debrouwere

3. Use any data with the thought that whatever the number may be it is not set in stone.

Does your business REALLY have to be on social media?

That depends on your answer to this question: Will you still be doing business in the future?

With the social media addiction that is happening and the behavior of those who are teens for now and will be your potential future customers, this social media statistics shows that social media is not going to let up.

The next generation that will be buying your product is there now.

They are VERY attached to social media as you can see in the infographic below.

Teens Social Media Behavior

To not be on social media would be to your business’ peril.

It is truly the wave of the future. It continues to evolve, but then, you know that already. Stop dragging your feet. Be there already!

You want leads and sales, right? Then read on…..

How Social Media Influences Purchasing Decisions

This type of social media statistics on how social media influences purchasing decisions is very interesting, IMHO.

The following thoughts below does not cover everything about the preceding infographic, but my intent is for it to help you have an idea on what platform to choose and why.

• Additional product information
  Pinterest almost beats both Facebook and Twitter combined.We recommend cross-checking this data with the platform’s analytics as an example.If you know that many of your clients, are not there then do not use it if you are pressed for time.Want referral traffic for brand awareness? There are many success stories about Pinterest being a great traffic driver.Test if it’s those stories would be true for your company. It may or it may not.Also, see if they are quality referral traffic? Meaning, are they the people you want to buy from you? And are spending time on your website to get to know your company?
• Product Discovery
  If you are just starting and would want to scale your brand awareness in social media, according to this social media data, Twitter beats both Facebook and Pinterest when it comes to product discovery.BTW, that’s where a material handling company discovered my business, and of course used one of our services.
• Purchase Location Identification
  If you are a brick and mortar business, it is VERY helpful to geotag (add location) your posts in ALL platforms if that feature is available. The good new is that it is FREE

Did you notice that the above social media statistics represents marketing goals such as growing brand awareness, engagement and leads and more? That’s what you want, right?

Do you have to be on every social media platform?

There is no clear-cut answer to this.

Take stock of your business resources and how much you want to commit to social media – that would include time, money and staff. If you don’t have enough of all of those, pick the one where MANY of your clients are active.

Test it.

Measuring it is the most solid way to figure out if it truly truly truly works for your business. You can’t get reliable data on a few try, however. This takes time and relentless consistency.

Are the millennial your target audience? A lot of them are NOT on LinkedIn, and you know that, right?

If your target audience is the male population, you would not want to hang out on Pinterest too much. I know there are many cute things there, but….

If unsure, IMHO, the best place to start is Facebook. Yeeees!

Why?

According to Statistista, in January 2017, Facebook had 1.87 million active users compared to other 21 social media platforms worldwide. The business owners you are targeting are perhaps Moms and Dads who may be engaging with their family on Facebook.

Best Time to Post on Social Media

Best times to post on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

The good thing about that data is that tells you that you do not have to be on social media all day unless that’s your business job.

If you do not know that yet the best times to post for your firm, I would recommend using the social media data like the above as your starting point.You can adjust best times that are unique to your business and for each of your specific audience later when you have reliable information from your own social analytics later.

Two things to note:

1. There are so many factors that could affect best times to post on social media such as season, time of day, the day of the week and more.
2. The schedule you created based on high volume of engagement could change. It is another moving target.

If you are the type of business that has a broad range of target market, that would mean different social habits for each niche. Also, that would mean different best times to post for each unique audience.

There you have it. My take on how to use data out there.

For your business, what do you typically look for when you come across social media statistics like this?

If you need help with yours, we are here to help! Call or contact us.

See entire infographic: 115 Social Media Facts

If you own a business, your website should do more than just give customers your basic information; it should be driving leads and converting them into sales. In the age of Googling, your website can be one of your most powerful sales tools, and it’s not just design and convincing copy that get you customers. Your content should be driving leads to your doorstep.

Not Just Content, But Content Marketing

The first thing you need to do to drive leads with content is shift your attitude. Content isn’t just content. It’s not just space filler or a good read. Content should have a purpose and a reason for existing. Get rid of the idea of content and welcome the strategy of content marketing: the creation of content for the simple purpose of getting and retaining customers.

Get Your Leads Into the Sales Funnel With Content

Your potential leads aren’t even in your sales funnel yet, which means you need to attract and engage them. Content is perfect for this because, by its very nature, it is not sales-y. Attract those leads with content that they want to consume. It should be interesting, but also informative. Think about the kinds of questions your potential customers have and then create content to answer them.

For example, let’s say you’re in the business of selling flower arrangements and houseplants. What do your future customers want to know about flowers? (If you’re not sure, read the next section and start researching your keywords.) Maybe someone who is thinking of buying a bouquet of roses is wondering whether red, pink or white would be most appropriate. He Googles it and finds your blog post on the meanings of the colors of roses. You just got a lead and he’s now in your sales funnel.

Find Your Search Terms and Use Them

Content should also be used as part of an overall SEO strategy. More potential leads will find your site if you are optimizing your content with the right keywords. Using the right keywords is the key, though. If you’re not using the terms your potential customers are searching with, your careful placement of them in content is all for naught. Use tools like Wordtracker, Übersuggest, and Google Trends to find out what people are actually typing in the search window.

Apply the Same Psychological Trick that Copywriters Use

Copywriters are a manipulative bunch. The single-minded focus of their craft is to make you do something. This requires a few tricks that get into your psyche. The most important trick that copywriters use is that they try to feel your pain and then use it to make you think that buying something will erase that pain.

Let’s go back to the flower example. What kind of pain might your potential customers have? Maybe it’s that they don’t know what to get mom for Mother’s Day. “She never likes my gifts! She always thinks I spent too much or that I got her something she doesn’t need.” You write an article about how a potted plant is the perfect, non-wasteful, lasts-forever, inexpensive Mother’s Day gift that no mom can complain about. Find your customers’ collective pain and use content to convince them you can fix it.

Vary Your Content and Update Your Content

One or two content themes won’t attract leads from every corner of your audience, which means you need to produce varied and updated content regularly. Not everyone is having a hard time picking a gift for Mom or worrying about rose colors. Reach everyone by hitting all the topics related to flowers. It’s also important to vary the medium. Use blogs, videos, social media posts, articles, webinars, newsletters and infographics to better reach and interest everyone who didn’t know they needed to buy flowers.

Don’t Forget the Call to Action

That guy investigating the colors of roses may be prepared to buy his lady a bouquet from you after reading your informative and interesting article, but if you don’t push him he might just go to the store down the road. Every bit of content should include a call to action. “Say it with roses, today” encourages your reader to go ahead and buy, especially when linked to the page where he can actually buy roses.

Add content marketing to your to-do list. It’s one of the best ways to drive new leads to your site, to gather readers in your sales funnel and to turn them into real customers. The best thing about crafting great content is that it doesn’t just get you new leads, it helps you keep them. Good content is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to market your business.

Business blogging: Is your company publishing one regularly – or not yet?

According to InsideView:

33% of B2B companies use blogs.

If your company is one of the 33% of that is publishing business blogs, then you can give your team a pat on the back. You are ahead of those who are not.

To you, the 67% that do not have business blogging as part of your marketing communication tool, you are missing a lot! See the benefits (below) that come with blogging that those that do are already reaping.

I was one of the 67%.

It took me a year or so to include business blogging part of our company’s marketing tools.

I am going to start this article as to why it took me that long.

To those of you who want to know the benefits and the planning tips for your business, go ahead and scroll down the next sections.

Business Blogging: Personal Journey

No one will read it. No one will share it. So I thought.

There are many topics about social media marketing already, why add to the content glut. Right!

However, guess what?! My “Aha! moment”…)

If I (you can insert your business name here) do not produce business blogs, where will my potential customers get the information they are searching for in social media and Google? From businesses that publish blog articles. THAT includes MY (your)competitors that post blogs.

Of course, I know I can’t control which blog people visit, but I can control the contents that I publish so people would read it, or much less share it.

Having said that, my immediate business blogging goal, and it continues to be the primary (goal), is to publish informative content.

I write and publish blog articles that I won’t’ be embarrassed to forward to somebody.

When I published my first article, I was struggling to put together 250-300 words.

But you know writing always begins with just ONE word.

Remember one of my concerns at the beginning of this section? See my top 10 most shared social media marketing articles here according to the social media community.

What our company blog is NOT:

1. It is not 100% perfect. I did not start out as an expert blogger (and still am not); nor am I a technical genius. Admittedly, I tend to get trapped in making sure that EVERYTHING is shiny because something always isn’t right. THAT includes images, formatting, fonts, font color, and many details. Also, my two grammar checkers aren’t perfect either neither am I.
2. I do not write weekly, but I write content regularly. Well,
   Once a month is all I can do. I am not as prolific as a writer as many of you are. I go for depth instead of breadth. You can write as often as you like. You can write short or long content. There is NO hard and fast rule to blogging. I don’t believe there is. It all depends on your business objectives and time that you have available.

Just start writing.

Business Blogging Benefits You’re Missing

These are what companies that regularly publish blogs are reaping and what you aren’t if you are not publishing articles.

Inbound traffic to YOUR website, NOT your competitors
Company Blogging Benefit 1

Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links, according to Hubspot.

Using HomeZada, as an example, they understand that social media marketing is a powerful business marketing tool if harnessed well to get their clients and potential customers know about their digital home management software.

One of their objectives for hiring us to use social media to drive traffic to their site. And so, we did. Here’s a case study about web referral traffic for the first year.

For 2016, our social media efforts contributed 48% web traffic for one of their web properties – and the remainder is a combination of other channels. If we combine all their web properties, social media referral traffic is third to paid search and organic search.

Our social media success can be attributed to their producing hundreds of useful and helpful blog contents for their product users.

Now, wait a minute, don’t go running and start publishing your business blog yet.

Check the planning tips below to organize your team.

Whatever content you produce, make sure the content is helpful and relevant to your audience. An overly promotional blog is NOT relevant to your audience.

Give it your best. Research on the topic. Experience is good, but it is also good to do some research to back it up. Including data won’t make it bad either.

This web traffic thing is cumulative. Be relentlessly consistent.

Business blogs can establish you as an expert in your niche
Company Blogging Benefit 2

A 2015 survey conducted by affilinet states that:

Bloggers ranked third as the most trusted source of information, behind friends and family…

…yes you can do that without tooting your horn that you ARE an expert.

While Hubspot says:

Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate online information.

If you could do just ONE thing online to market your business, make it business blogging. A relevant business blog is the heart of everything you do to establish your company as the expert.

Your product may not be sexy so what could you write about it? As an example, DCSC Inc, a shipping and supply chain solution to businesses. Not hot, right? Ok, read this material handling and shipping article written by DCSC. Isn’t THAT information helpful to businesses?

It’s worth noting that it takes time for others to recognize your expertise especially when you rely on inbound marketing. But like seeds, you’ll reap the fruit in due course.

Your business blog is a doorway to your “sales pages
Company Blogging Benefit 3

81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs. (Source: BlogHer)

Each time you publish a blog you are underscoring that open door for customers and potential leads to knowing more about your expertise, or your product.

It helps develop trust and eventually help you grow sales.

Once they are on your site, guide them around! *Hint* Link freely to contextual articles or pages.

Your company blog muscles up your social media profiles.
Company Blogging Benefit 4

Treat your social media profiles as your business’s publishing tools.

That’s where you share your helpful and relevant articles.

Remember I mentioned above that that’s how we helped HomeZada?

The more often you share helpful content, the stronger your brand becomes in social media.

If all you are posting in social media are your home, product or sales pages, then you are missing the “make-it-relevant-to-your-audience” part.

People do not use social media to buy from businesses.

See this report from Global Web Index? Do you see where “buying” is in this chart?

Helpful info via @globalwebindex on why people use social.

A heads up to peeps that do #socialmediaoptimization. pic.twitter.com/ubLSdaQwuD

— rubyrusine (@SocialSMktg) April 14, 2017

Way down in the bottom. That’s right.

Yes, businesses can use social media to sell, but if your posts are all about how great your product is. Then, you are doing social selling wrong.

Your company blog pages can help your social selling efforts. A LOT.

I’d venture to say this: social media is useless if you do not publish a blog. You are just wasting your time.

Blogging is a tool that could help your brand’s online visibility
Company Blogging Benefit 5

The more you blog, the more visible your business becomes.

Let’s make that clearer. The more helpful blog you publish; the more people share it with THEIR followers.

Search engine rewards companies that publish fresh content regularly
Company Blogging Benefit 6

According to Content Plus,

Websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages.

You want THAT.

Fresh content, like your blog, signals search engines that you have a web presence that is active. Regularly publishing a new blog is an invitation for bots to crawl and index it.

What about your product and “About Us” pages? Those are essential contents, but those are….OLD.

Do you like stale bread? I don’t. The search engine spiders look for fresh bread contents.

Imagine the web as a (digital) library and the search engines as its librarians and your business blog as the book. The more content you add to the library, and for the same topic, the more resources the search engine have available to offer to those seeking information that you cover online.

Business Blogging is an inexpensive marketing and communication tool.
Company Blogging Benefit 7

Blogging is an inexpensive way to increase your business’ portfolio.

It is a good marketing tool that your company could use to communicate about your business.

You can use it to:

• Promote your business
• Answer questions that your typical target audience ask
• Engage with your current and potential customers
• Offer tips and advice

What to do: Your Company Blogging Checklist

If the above convinced you that your team better get on to producing marketing blogs, here are a few things that you need to do now with your staff before publishing your business blog.

There is NO right and wrong answer to this, but these are worth considering.

1. Author/s
2. Who is going to be in the by-line? Is it your company leaders? Founders, Owners, Presidents and Vice Presidents
   Will your marketing and sales team be involved?
   Is the article piece going to be written by someone internally or are you going to outsource this?Your business blog is public. It represents your company. No matter who you decide to be your blog authors, the author/s should be able to set aside personal opinions and personal goals. Authors should focus on your company’s aims and objectives. If your corporate blogger can’t differentiate his/her opinion and goals from your business, my advice is to find someone else.
3. ContentWill your content be about company news, product tips, and surveys? What different formats are you going to include in your business blogs? Do an inventory of what you already have:
   • Images
   • Texts
   • PDF of Company/product brochures
   • Video
   • Whitepaper
   • Podcast

Regardless of what you decide to produce, any helpful content is always always always beneficial to your audience. Also, it gets often shared if it’s that way.

You see, valuable contents that you produce are contents that keep on giving.

Bonus Tip: Include here when planning your business blogging topics, the results from your keywords research.

Your business keywords are topics that your customers are already looking for already.

Using the keywords that you already researched on is speaking the language of your audience. Your audience rarely uses the technical jargon so you can leave that elsewhere. It is not about optimizing for search engine’s sake. It is speaking your audience’s language.

3. Topics

Are there topics that are OK to write about?

What topics are off limits? Is there any that is off limits?

Any proprietary information they should not release or not?

I used to publish contents for a company that’s publicly traded. Truth be told, although I was given the full rein of online marketing, it was stressful.

Why? I didn’t know what I was writing, or conversations I was participating in were OK to them. They did not have guidelines. No one had the time to create one. And, it was a publicly-traded company.

4. Tone of Voice

Keep the tone casual.

It’s a blog.

It is not a technical paper.

Does your company have a personality? You can show that in your business blog.

However, even though it is conversational, one thing that authors should be made aware of is that it represents your company. You cannot just say anything you wanted to say. Hence, take note of tip #8 below.

5. Content Calendar

This is essential, and even, more essential if you have several people involved in blogging for your company. It keeps everyone organized and focused.

Content calendar – can reflect topic and authors. Do you have one?

You don’t have to make this complicated. You can use Outlook, Google calendar or Excel spreadsheet to as your content calendar.

6. Expected Results

What are your expected outcomes?

• Higher visibility?
• Improved customer service and satisfaction?
• Research?
• More leads?
• New Product Ideation?

How are you going to track results? What tools would you use?

7. Metrics
   

How are you going to measure your expected results?

What is your success metric?

What will make EVERYONE happy?

• Social media shares
• Monthly visits
• New visitors
• Downloads
• Event registration
• Ticket sales
• Email sign-ups
• …and whatever is the key metric for you

All your content marketing metrics, or however you call it, should point to WHY your company is doing business blogging, in the first place.

8. Rules and Limitations

This is essential to protect your business’s image. It is like future-proofing your business.

Include here things that are obvious to YOU as rules and limitations.

Because they may be obvious to you but not to everyone

You trust your online representatives, right? Well, that’s what some of the companies who had people represent them online did; only for them to resort to damage control later.

Make sure you check with your lawyer before you finalize this part.

Building Company Blog from Scratch

1. Name

Decide on a that is easy to remember.

Bonus Tip:

On that note, check if the business name you selected is trademarked before you claim it as your business domain name. The domain name may not be owned by someone, but it might be trademarked by someone else.

It happened to me when I first launch my business website.

Another bonus tip for blogs:

Good URL: blog.socialsuccessmarketing.com
Also, a good URL: socialsuccessmarketing.com/blog
Bad URL: socialsucessmarketing.otherwebsite.com – this means it is hosted by another company. And it’s that company that is getting ALL the traffic and SEO benefits, not you.

If you are doing this as merely as a hobby, that bad URL structure is fine. But if you are doing this as a business then go for a self-hosted URL (the good ones)

2. Content Management System

Pick the content management system (CMS) that you think would be appropriate when you company jumps into business blogging. The truth is there is no perfect CMS for companies. Speak with your team. Ask an expert.

Don’t decide based on the bells and whistles it offers. Determine what you need it for, what you want to accomplish. Then see if the tool you are considering can handle those.

Conclusion

Many companies have implemented business blogging successfully. However, there are those that have implemented it without measurable benefits. Why? Because they have not set their WHY for blogging. Alternatively, there are those who have hurt the corporate image. Why? Because they failed to include rules and limitations on what their online representatives should do.

If you love your business, add a well-planned business blogging strategy in your marketing communications kit.

Good morning! Here's what you need to know in markets on Friday.

1. Apple has held talks with Visa about making its own pre-paid debit cards, Recode reported on Thursday. The pre-paid debit cards would tie into an unannounced service that would allow iPhone users to send money to each other digitally.

2. Swiss bank UBS kicked off 2017 with a 79% jump in net profit as a brighter outlook boosted its investment bank and client trading in its core wealth management business. Switzerland's biggest bank and the world's largest wealth manager said on Friday net profit for the first three months of 2017 was 1.3 billion Swiss francs (£1.01 billion), Reuters reports.

3. Marks & Spencer is to trial an online grocery shopping service this year, it said on Thursday, conceding it could no longer ignore the fastest growing segment of the market. For years M&S has resisted giving its customers the option of ordering food online for home delivery, saying it did not make economic sense for its offering, which is focused on the "food for tonight" market and tends to be small basket sizes.

4. Royal Bank of Scotland has reached a settlement with some of its shareholders over its controversial £12 billion rights issue in 2008, narrowing the outstanding legal claim against the lender to about £500 million. The Telegraph reports that the bank, which is 71% owned by the taxpayer, is scrambling to avoid a lengthy court battle with investors who claim they were misled about the lender’s financial health when it tapped them for cash, just months before its £45.5 billion bailout during the credit crunch.

5. UK GDP figures are coming. Preliminary estimates for first quarter GDP growth will be released by the ONS at 8.30 a.m. BST (3.30 a.m. ET). Economists are expecting growth of 2.2% compared to a year ago and growth of 0.4% on the previous quarter.

6. Anthony Levandowski, the head of Uber's self-driving group, is stepping aside in the face of trade-theft accusations from his former employer, Waymo. In an email obtained by Business Insider, Levandowski said he will no longer be working on Lidar, the specialized radar sensors that autonomous vehicles rely on to map their surroundings and to navigate on their own.

7. Google's parent company Alphabet beat earnings expectations on the top and bottom line for the first quarter. The stock was up more than 4% in after-hours trading.

8. Starbucks reported first-quarter earnings that showed profits in line with expectations but a miss on sales at stores open for at least one year. Comparable-store sales rose 3%, below analysts' forecast for 3.6%, according to Bloomberg.

9. US stocks finished Thursday little changed as the Trump administration creeps closer to the psychologically important 100-day mark on Saturday. The Dow and S&P 500 held flat, while the Nasdaq climbed a bit into the green to a new all-time high.

10. Asian stocks aren't up to much. Japan's Nikkei stock market is down 0.33% at the time of writing (6.25 a.m. BST/1.25 a.m. ET), the Hong Kong Hang Seng is down 0.27%, and China's Shanghai Composite index is down 0.39%.

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The consumerization of tech has transformed more than just how people buy and interact with technology. It’s caused many B2C marketers to migrate to B2B and back again. Throughout my own career, I’ve worked across B2C and B2B companies of all sizes from CPG giants like Kimberly Clark and Kraft to Wayfair.com and now OpenView, where I consult exclusively with B2B software companies. In fact, at Wayfair, a well-established consumer company, I was charged with helping to build their B2B program. A key driver of Wayfair’s rapid B2B expansion, 20 to 500 sales reps in 3 years, was leveraging the organization’s best-in-class B2C marketing strategies.

My experiences on both sides of the marketing spectrum are becoming all the more common. Andy Freedman, a self-described recovering corporate brand marketer, has spent more than a decade working with some of the best-known consumer brands including Dunkin’ Donuts, General Mills and Visa. But most recently, he transitioned into the software space as CMO of Riskified, an eCommerce fraud prevention solution for online merchants.

So how can B2B marketers apply consumer skills to help grow their software companies? Freedman explains in this exclusive interview.

It’s All About the Brand (Which Is All About Your Customer)

“One thing that is sometimes a struggle for B2B companies is being strategic about the way they interact with, listen to, and empathize with their early customers,” Freedman says. “This is something that the good consumer brands do very well. They spend a lot of time and resources doing market research – talking with, watching, and interacting with customers. And that effort isn’t just in the interest of user experience. It’s about really understanding customer problems and identifying the insights that allow them to help solve those problems.”

It can be challenging to prioritize this kind of brand work in the early stages of a startup, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of making the effort. “At an early stage, you’re always capped by resources to some extent, whether that’s human capital or financial capital,” Freedman says. But B2B companies are actually set up perfectly to get customer feedback (with a little preparation) in order to define their brand. Sales or customer success is talking to customers and prospects every single day. Yet I’ve see too many B2B companies that fail to capitalize on this proximity. Marketers, this is your responsibility! Create a feedback cadence and framework to gain insights from your customers.

The Importance of (Really) Knowing Your Brand Champion

Whichever audience you’re pursuing, Freedman advocates strongly for the concept of a brand champion. “We talked a lot about this at General Mills and it went much deeper than just describing a mom who is thirty-five years old, has two kids, and lives in a Boston suburb,” he says. “We had to get a much more in-depth understanding of their likes and dislikes, what frustrates them, what gives them joy, and what problems they have. That’s what we needed to know in order to go out and create the right products or market the products we had in a more effective way.”

Freedman contends that the same attention to detail needs to happen in B2B marketing. “I’m quick to recommend that everyone in the organization should interact with early customers – not just product and customer success people, but also engineers and marketers,” he explains. “Everyone should have exposure that helps them keep the voice of the customer in mind. This gets us away from speaking to potential customers as ‘decision makers,’ and helps us start to really understand who these people are so we can develop a really robust customer persona.”

The Brand Book – Yes, You Need One

Another brand asset that’s more typically associated with B2C companies is the brand book or brand architecture, but it can be a valuable asset for any B2B company. “First, there’s the internal process of building the document,” he says. “And then there’s sharing it inside your organization to make sure that everyone at the company – no matter their role – is operating off the same page.” Your brand architecture doesn’t have to be complex to start. A one pager that summarizes your brand is a great starting point:

Freedman emphasizes the importance of messaging consistency. “Everyone in your company needs to be able to clearly and succinctly define what you do and how you do it better than others,” he says. “When that’s done well and you’re all using the same language, it’s truly impactful. It influences not just your marketing communications strategy, but also product – the things you build – and the way you talk to customers and solve their problems. From marketing to the way your customer service team operates to how you send an invoice, that values-based messaging and language touches everything you do.”

But building the book and standardizing on messaging aren’t alone enough to get everyone on the same page. In a B2C company, testing new messaging can be as simple as changing your ad creative or emails and running a few experiments. But with B2B, I’ve personally seen that it’s much more complex. You likely have BDRs personalizing email templates on their own and reps tailoring your pitch to their specific targets. It’s imperative that your sales team understands your brand messaging and value prop so that the language they use is similar to the message prospects experience at the top of the funnel.

Channel Mix Optimization – Continuous Rapid Improvement

Consumer tech companies are especially savvy when it comes to constantly testing and optimizing their channel mix. Sure fewer steps in a consumer funnel might make this easier for B2C companies, but complexities shouldn’t prevent you from unlocking the data driven insights you gain from experimenting. And early stage companies actually have an advantage here because a small team also means a more agile team.

“The beauty of being at an early stage growth company is that you have a willingness to experiment,” Freedman says. “You should be willing to do things you can measure, invest heavily in things that work, and learn from the things that don’t.” But before you do start testing, make sure you have clean data and good visibility into your base metrics. Without these, it will be impossible to gain a clear picture of how leads flow through your funnel and where and why they convert. A trackable and succinct funnel is the foundation for all demand gen experiments.

On the surface, B2C and B2B companies and their marketing strategies appear vastly different. But when you break it down, every good marketer is after the same thing – understanding their customers so they can provide the best possible experience.

The post B2C Lessons for Software Marketers: It’s All About Keeping the Customer Front and Center appeared first on OpenView Labs.

5 Powerful Use Cases for Social Advocacy & How You Can Get Started written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Over 50 million businesses now have a Facebook page and are actively reaching out to their target audience. As a consequence, the social network has reduced the organic reach of commercial content, to protect its users’ interests.

Ogilvy once predicted that organic reach of brand content would someday drop to zero, and brands need to prepare their outreach strategies to face that outcome.

In today’s social scenario, there is probably no better way to influence your target market than by establishing social advocates.

There are several end goals that you can have for social advocacy and different programs that you can build to achieve them. These are five powerful use cases of social advocacy.

1. Brand awareness

Isolated, a brand can reach 1-2% of its existing following by posting content on official networks. With the help of advocates that reach could be increased by as much as 561%, according to MSLGroup’s research.

Social posts also have short shelf-lives and stay in view only when they are shared and distributed by your community. To initiate that process, you need advocates.

If you want to quickly make an impact on a large following, you simply need to identify and active your social advocates. They can be super-fans, happy consumers or employees.

IronSource incentivized their content distribution and got staff involved. The result? 24% of their engagement today can be attributed to advocacy.

You simply need a platform through which you can share content with your advocates.

2. Lead generation & sales

When companies combine great content with advocate-based distribution, they have seen great results, like a five-fold increase in web traffic and 25% more leads.

IronSource has employees across departments (everything from tech to marketing) share content and promotes the company on social networks like Twitter.

The key is to ensure that your advocates are connected with your target market, directly or indirectly.

You could also encourage happy consumers to go vocal on social networks. They are likely to be connected with more prospects.

3. Improved talent acquisition

If your company has a great work culture that your employees are excited to be proud of, you could significantly improve your recruitment efficiency by using that to your advantage on social networks.

Many large organizations have employees share achievements, pictures of office retreats and activities and establish powerful employer brands on social networks.

• 69% of prospect employees who look your company up won’t apply if you have a bad reputation.
• Prospects who come through employees are far more likely to convert, and more quickly (Source: HRinAsia).

Starbucks has an entire Twitter page dedicated to employees and company culture called Starbucks Partners.

4. Crowd-sourced content

Content creation is expensive and time-consuming when not outsourced.

• Over 50% of B2B and B2C content marketers identify creating engaging content as a challenge.
• Over 90% B2B clients distrust content created by vendors.

Instead of creating all of your content, you could source it from your community of advocates.

Crowd-sourcing content gets people involved – employees, target groups and potential micro-influencers.

You can crowd-source content in 6 ways –

• Brainstorm with influencers on mutually beneficial content that you can create
• Regularly reach out to consumers for feedback and success stories
• Feature advocates on your blog or social pages as part of a post
• Round-up pre-existing tips or ideas from potential advocates on a post
• Target early adopters and encourage feedback
• Target niche communities and amplify distribution

Build these relationships before you need them, and see how content creation and distribution becomes easy for you.

5. Event marketing

Events, webinars, podcasts, and live streams have become important parts of content marketing in the current scenario. Brands create video and audio based aids to connect with and get on the good books of their target groups.

Typically, only 25% of the people who register for online events, show up, and only about half or less of that group of people stay until the end. To ensure that you have that capacity optimized, you need to expand your reach and increase your registrations.

Advocates can help you create event buzz, before, during and after the event.

Most events create dedicated hashtags and connect their advocates with content to make the sharing easy.

You can use email newsletters or advocacy platforms to distribute your content to advocates.

Getting started

There are different types of advocates that you can employ or active – brand ambassadors, brand advocates or celebrities.

Brand ambassadors – These are people specifically employed by a brand to talk about it on social networks. They can be influencers, niche experts (bloggers or content channel owners) or employees.

Brand advocates – These are super-fans or people who appreciate your brand and/or product, interact with it naturally on social and are likely to participate in activities that you initiate.

Celebrities – Celebrities are usually contracted by brands with big budgets who want to reach a mass audience.

Identify your advocates

Identify the people who are connected with your target demographic and have influence over them. You can do that by setting keyword alerts on a social media monitoring tool like BrandWatch.

Set alerts for important hashtags, keywords and tangential concepts in your niche. Shortlist people who match your tone of voice, seem to lead conversations and have good engagement on their posts.

Build relationships with your advocates

Add your advocates’ Twitter handles or names to your social monitoring list, or create Twitter lists to monitor their activity.

Pay attention to their work and show them support by helping them distribute your content. Once you are certain that they know you and are comfortable with you, reach out to them with an advocacy agreement.

Create an agreement that benefits both parties.

Create and curate great content for your advocates to share

The better your content is, the more conversions you will get when it is amplified by your advocates. Avoid using advocate channels to directly sell your products right off the bat.

Create content that offers their audience value and reinforces the relationship between you and your advocates and their audience. Visual content, in particular, performs well on social. You could use a graphic design software like Venngage to turn your blog posts into infographics for sharing.

If you are working with employee advocates, having them share industry content can help improve their social presence and so the quality of the leads they attract and help you convert.

You could use a social media management dashboard like DrumUp that allows content curation and easy sharing with employees.

While running your social advocacy program, monitor your analytics on a regular basis (reach, engagement, click-throughs, website traffic, and conversions) and ascertain if your content and advocates are helping you achieve your intended goals.

About the Author

Jessica Davis represents Godot Media, a leading content firm. Her areas of interest include social media and content marketing.

When it comes to sales and marketing types, they want to like each other. In fact, in my experience, they want to love each other! After all, sales and marketing work towards a common goal—generating more revenue. But the fact remains that as long as sales relies on marketing to help close deals and marketing relies on sales to get the company message out, there’s bound to be conflict.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Sales wants very specific, personalized content that they can find at a moment’s notice. Marketing feels they publish volumes of content (and they do—but 65% of it can’t be found), and they’re sensitive to changing content because it changes the company message. In the end, we have two mission critical groups with a common goal—but different ways of getting there—and mounting frustration.

I think it’s worth mentioning that in the not-so-distant past, the sales and marketing conflict was usually about lead quality. Sales didn’t think marketing delivered high enough quality leads, and marketing never knew if sales did anything with the leads they delivered. Marketing automation fixed this issue, and marketing can now easily see how their programs perform and can have educated discussions with sales around data regarding leads, rather than the subjective views about what’s working and what’s not.

This is where we’d all ideally like to get with content, and with a little effort, it’s possible to get there! A sales enablement solution is to content what marketing automation was to leads. It’s a game-changer, and while many organizations are getting on board with sales enablement, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

How it often is

As a marketer, I have direct experience working on the creation side of the content conundrum. In a previous role at a high-tech company, I spent a lot of time and energy (and money!) creating extensive marketing campaigns to target specific accounts with specific demographic profiles. I segmented campaigns by industry, department, even job title, and then developed thorough builds of materials (BOMs) to make sure the message landed as intended. Distribution involved putting them into Box, uploading SharePoint, as well as emailing to sales reps.

Sound familiar?

The problem of course, is that once the materials left my hands…POOF! I lost all visibility into how they performed, or were modified once they were in the hands of the sales reps. This, of course, is no fault of sales—there simply wasn’t a system in place to methodically track usage and results.

How it can be

Working at Highspot, I truly feel empowered (and admittedly spoiled). My process for content creation isn’t vastly different: I do the research you’d expect to develop a campaign and work with the right people to create the assets, depending on the target audience.

The difference is in the management and distribution. Now, I load an asset into Highspot—like a presentation or email template for sales rep use—and can immediately measure its impact, even if it’s modified.

Watch Content Comparison Video

This data lets our entire marketing team know where to focus our efforts—what to keep doing, stop doing, or do differently. This has helped end the sales/marketing battles I was so used to having in the past. There’s no need to argue because we can all see what’s working and what’s not—and marketing can snap to what sales needs with confidence because the feedback isn’t hearsay, it’s actually what’s happening in the field.

Watch Content Usage Video

When you can map content back to revenue results, you can more easily optimize content over time. When marketers know what works, we know where to focus energy, and can build a well-informed roadmap of content to create to better help sales in the future. The content usage report is a crucial tool in my toolbox because it tells me in black-and-white what sales is using—and what they’re not. Sales likes it too, because they have the ability to easily report back client feedback on each piece of content they use. In other words, it’s worthwhile to provide feedback because their voices are heard.

I think one of the most amazing aspects of using a sales enablement solution to manage content is being able to prove ROI on each piece of content. Not only does an ROI report end the content finger-pointing between sales and marketing, it shows the actual value of content in the sales cycle.

If you’re considering a sales enablement solution, good! Evolution of sales and marketing processes are both inevitable and essential to long-term success. By embracing a sales enablement process, you can capitalize on the power of technology to transform your content engine.

Want to learn more? Download our complementary whitepaper: “Unlock the Genetic Code of your Sales Content” to understand how to measure and optimize content performance through the sales cycle.