Rnordman

Your value proposition. You know it must be compelling to land the sales you want.

You’ve sweated over the details, carefully tailoring each differentiator. You communicate it, and what happens?

The customer tells you they don’t see any advantage and that they’re already happy with the company they use. No appointment. No new sale, no bonus check.

It’s enough to send any salesperson into a tailspin and wipe out motivation to keep selling aggressively.

Think you’re not cut out for differentiating value convincingly?
Think you must lower the price to make a sale? Likely not.

Really, the solution may be simpler than you imagine. Learning the basics to differentiate from competitors so it’s possible to make more sales may be all you need.

Use these suggestions to differentiate your value and land more business.

1. Recognize that just because two competitor’s products are alike, doesn’t mean their value is the same.

My first sales job out of college was selling chemicals (commodities) for a Fortune 500 company. When you sell a chemical solvent like 1,1,1, trichloroethylene, there isn’t anything to differentiate from the other guy’s, or, isn’t there?

Actually, there’s so much to differentiate for a B2B product or service that your test won’t be in coming up with differentiators, but choosing the best ones.

For starters, think on these possible differentiators of value.

Your company’s processes, QC methodologies, storage, delivery, product performance, field support, testing procedures, R&D, peace of mind assurance, reliability, consistency, customer service, responsiveness to a problem…

If you want to create separation that really matters, present differentiated value that links to what the customer cares about, and what you can guide them to care about.

The more relevance your customer sees, the stronger your case for better value.

Now, use the next step to complete your list of the most important differentiators.

2. Make a list of possible differentiators to separate your product or services.

What can you do to fuel your believability, get customer’s to genuinely consider value and stop being fixated on price alone? Take some important steps such as:

• Create a master list of possible differentiators – points of separation that most customers care about.
• It can be helpful to start with a resource like: The 49 Commodity Crushing Differentiators of Value then narrow it down from there.
• Set your product or services apart with a compelling value proposition.
• Tailor your value proposition to fit each customer’s unique need.

The reason most customers hate sales pitches today is because they usually say zero about what makes a company’s value meaningful or different.

Tailoring value through carefully developed differentiators, gives you an opportunity to distinguish your value proposition from the strongest competitors.

Tune-up your differentiation skills

This isn’t brain surgery. It isn’t cookie-cutter simplistic either.
You need a process.

Once you have a set of differentiators that form a powerful value proposition, ask good questions to create a value conversation with your prospect.

A good question makes your prospect stop and think. And customers must think before they make a switch.

Never ask a question you aren’t reasonably sure you know the answer for; and always be prepared with a secondary question that deepens interest.

4. Resist lowering price to satisfy a customer’s demands

Customers want high value, but they also want low prices. To get low prices customers will say, “Cut us a deal because we’re going to buy based solely on the lowest price.”

Don’t believe it. Why? It’s just not accurate.

Most customers primarily use price pressure as a negotiation tactic, and what they actually want is to make an accurate decision about the best value.

Studies have shown that 95 percent of B2B purchase decisions are based on other factors than price, leaving 5 percent of decisions based solely on price alone.

Still, you want to be prepared for handling price push back confidently and convincingly. Getting your mindset ready, knowing what you will say or ask, is crucial work.

Bottom-line

When customers make a purchase they want the most value. Stay committed to selling value and resist the knee-jerk response to lower prices.

Make a compelling case for value, communicate differentiators to appeal to what they care about and advance the sale to a close.

Author: Ellen Gomes

As 6500+ marketers descended on Moscone in San Francisco, it could only mean one thing. Marketing Nation Summit has arrived. We kicked off the 2017 Marketing Nation Summit on Sunday with an amazing Fun Run, Marketo University training, and our annual customer and partner awards gala, The Revvies. As the official day one (Monday) at the Marketing Nation Summit wraps up, this post will cover highlights from the amazing keynotes and breakout sessions.

New Customer Expectations

Things kicked off with a literal bang—with live drums and dancers. The audience was amped when Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas, took the stage and jumped into his TED-style talk describing the new world of communication and customer expectations.

What a start! #MKTGnation pic.twitter.com/q69zzUxmJJ

— Fred Hagerman (@FredHagerman) April 24, 2017

Steve described that today with digital marketing as the norm, marketers expect to be able to reach millions of people in an instant. And that’s pretty amazing but it a testament to the fact that change is now measured in seconds versus decades or years—we are living in a hyper-accelerated pace of change. Technology has the world around us. 

“Today we are making more complicated decisions than ever before, & as marketers do it in seconds” ~ @nstevenlucas #socialmedia #MKTGnation pic.twitter.com/akTTPJ69ha

— Tamara McCleary (@TamaraMcCleary) April 24, 2017

The Buyer Has A Louder Voice Than The Brand

Technology has helped advance the expectations and knowledge of our buyers. Our audiences are more focused than ever before on being treated as individuals. Steve asked the audience, as consumers, “Don’t we want to be valued?”, and “Don’t we know it when we aren’t valued?”  

Then Steve highlighted the challenge for marketers, where we’re fighting the law of supply and demand. Creating demand has become a de facto goal for many marketers, but the problem is in the supply curve—people have a finite amount of hours, and we have a fixed amount of attention.

The demand model many marketers operate with doesn’t account for the new way that buyers access information and how empowered they have become. Today, the buyer has a louder voice than the brand. It is the era of the buyer.

The Problem With Volume

As marketers, our success is hitting a limit—as we bump up against the law of diminishing returns. If an activity is successful, like digital marketing, we invest more and more in it but we’ve reached the point that the volume is overwhelming for our audience. Our engagement over time needs to be more scarce, and frankly more valuable.

It’s not just volume that is making marketing less effective, but the need for a personal relationship with the brand. Volume, unchecked does damage to our brands. You see buyers that opt out not because they dislike the brand, but they dislike the volume. Buyers still want to be marketed to, in fact, they want a real and lasting relationship with brands that get us. We need to embrace that we are no longer able to prescribe the terms of the relationship. We work for the buyer. Go curate the experience for the buyer.

Leading In The Engagement Economy

So how can you effectively engage your buyer? Steve shared that engagement is curating a personalized and meaningful experience and that we need to put all our energy into making our share of the finite buyer attention as meaningful as possible.

We’re spending too much time talking at buyers and not enough time engaging buyers. Engagement is what moves them to choose us. Steve shared that engagement is about value and values. So how can you lead in the Engagement Economy? By following these three rules:

1. Listen to your audience: Listening across every digital channel is paramount. Investing the time and resources to know your buyers.
2. Learn: We must as marketers embrace the inner data scientist within us and understand what truly drives lifetime value for customers. It’s time to bring in our own data and learn from that data and change what we do and how we measure.
3. Inspire: Inspire through engagement. Think about how you’re engaging today. Is every engagement point inspiring?

CMO’s Prepare for the Future

Next, Steve invited a group of executives to join him on stage to share their insights on marketing in the Engagement Economy. The first was a panel led by Jamie Gutfreund, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Wunderman. She introduced Penny Wilson, CMO at Hootsuite, Tracee Nalewak, VP of Customer Experience Marketing at Hakkasaan Engagement Group, and Jeff Wright, VP of Data Analytics and Automation at Autodesk and invited them to discuss how they are adapting to customer expectations, creating memorable moments and shaping their organizations to succeed in the Engagement Economy. Key highlights from our brilliant CMO panel include:

• “Now it’s time to empower your whole organization. You need to give your whole organization the tools, training, and content to engage with your customers. You can have them really work in social harmony with your customers.”—Penny Wilson
• “ To be effective means understanding our customers like never before. And data is critical to that. It helps us treat them in a way that is authentic and relevant.”—Jeff Wright
• “Put the customer at your core—take it to the next level and feed into their experience emotionally…creating relationships drives loyalty.”—Tracee Nalewak

Then, Marketo’s COO Greg Wolfe took the stage with Ariel Kelman, VP of Worldwide Marketing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) to discuss how to create a valuable journey for customers. Ariel shared that the journey AWS creates for prospects and customers is heavy on valuable, educational content and light on gated forms. His goal? “How can we help them [customers] adopt this technology?”, and “How can I make my customers successful and give them opportunities to highlight their success?”

You can’t fake customer success with marketing. Advocacy is earned. #MKTGnation

— Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley) April 24, 2017

The next guest to take the stage was Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, who shared the vision for Infor and Marketo as a strategic partnership.

Kind of blown away by depth & breadth of services of @Infor #MKTGnation CEO @cpinfor #WhoKnew pic.twitter.com/ae4910dMkI

— Drew Neisser (@DrewNeisser) April 24, 2017

Our next guest was Reggie Aggarwal, the CEO of Cvent, who shared a little bit about leveraging technology to amplify the power of human connection. In the Engagement Economy, events are one of the most effective ways to drive revenue because they help you engage your customers and prospects 1 to 1, and in person. And, nothing beats face to face. The true power of technology in that interaction? It helps events become measurable and shifts them from expenses to an asset.

Our final guest was the CMO of Box, Carrie Palin. Carrie shared insights with the audience about how Box is thinking about the technology stack that will prepare them to engage in the Engagement Economy. She shared that in addition to having Marketo act as the central nervous system of the Box stack, they are trying to deploy the right technology to address their wide range of personas in a targeted and specific way, and bridge the chasm between sales and marketing.

The King of Comedy

Finally, after much anticipation James Corden joined Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas on the stage and, to the delight of the audience, engaged in witty banter with Steve over the faux living room set-up, his presentation advancer, and the Amazon Alexa on stage. Steve asked James about how he thinks about creativity and storytelling, to which James replied that his methodology is less about the individual outputs (the video, the sketch, etc.) but more about, “what does it take to be ahead, or even, around the curve?”

Corden challenged marketers to think about how quickly the world is evolving. From his point of view, it’s a pace that is impossible to keep up. Convention or the status quo is the easy path, but he shared with Steve and the audience that, “The great thing about the internet is that the good rises to the top. If it’s good. People will find it. Chewbacca mom, for example. There is no great marketing person behind that. That’s a wonderful, creative, and freeing place to be if you are in the business of making content.” According to Corden, success in new areas can, “feel very new,” but it’s “actually the same. For example, you look at the rise of eSports (televised professional video game tournaments) but it’s actually the same. It’s not different than why someone would watch golf. To watch someone be extraordinary at something.”

Connection and Relationships

In his presentation- Learn to Speak, Share and Market Human, Bryan Kramer, industry influencer and President and CEO of Pure Matter, shared why it’s important for brands to let their ‘human’ shine through and how they (and you) can do it.

Based on his research, he’s boiled what it means to be human, as a person, and a brand into three traits: 1) Simplicity, 2) Empathy, and 3) Imperfection. And he pointed out that while it’s easy to think of brands that embody one of these elements, it’s fairly hard to find a brand that does all three. But, what it really comes down to is connection. How you connect with a business matters, and has a very tangible impact on how long of a relationship you will have with the service or business. Connection is what drives sharing, and it’s at the core of relationships.

What drives connection and sharing? It turns out that there are a few personas of online sharers (in fact, you can find out what kind you are here) and that ultimately, as a brand, or as a person, you are what you share. So if you want to change the way that people perceive you—you can share something different. But, he cautioned, do it authentically and honestly.

How To Think Like A CMO

Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade, delivered an authentic and humorous presentation on how to think like a CMO.

Neisser authored The CMO’s Periodic Table, which originated from a content marketing and social media strategy he created to boost his company during a tough time in 2008.

To help the audience truly think like a CMO, Neisser helpfully provided the acronym CATS—complete with cute cat pictures—which is outlined below:

• Courageous: As a CMO, you are held accountable for things that you’re not necessarily responsible for. To deliver, you have to be prepared to take risks. Sir Terry Leahy (who happens to be a British knight) is a perfect example of this. Prior to achieving knighthood, he was CMO of Tesco—the UK’s equivalent of Safeway or Vons. He spent some time trying to one-up the competition instead of doing anything unique or courageous. Then, he decided to take a risk and create a loyalty program that would risk 20% of the company’s revenue if it failed, but have an exponential payoff if it was successful. The risk ended up being well worth it, earning him a CEO title and knighthood.
• Artful: Since when does B2B have to be boring? Both GE and NASA have used social media to drive engagement with their customer base. GE was the first big B2B companies to engage on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, while NASA transformed their brand through social media, engaging with their fan base through stunningly gorgeous photographs on Instagram.
• Thoughtful: In a give-to-get economy, we must be mindful of content that delivers value beyond demand generation. Richard Marnell, CMO of Viking River Cruises, executes on this concept by creating fun, shareable content for people who have signed up for a cruise but are not due to depart for anywhere from 6-24 months. Richard created cooking videos featuring food from fabulous Viking River Cruise destinations such as Portugal and France. People who had already booked cruises shared these videos out of excitement for their trips, resulting in their friends signing up for cruises as well.
• Scientific: The best CMOs know that their revenue metrics must be simple, yet constantly evolving with the changing dynamics in their industry. Antonio Lucio, CMO of Visa, measures reach/recall, usage lift, and brand health. All CMOs also know the importance of repeatedly hypothesizing and testing on relevant KPIs and revenue metrics.

To really let Drew’s message sink in, check out this hilarious video of someone trying to organize their 10 kittens for a photo (spoiler alert: kittens do not cooperate for photos).

Marketing As An Agency

Joe Pulizzi is often called the godfather of content marketing, and it’s for a good reason. He’s championed content marketing both personally through his awesome books, but also through his company, Content Marketing Institute. This year he brought a fresh perspective, imploring marketers to think beyond being a cost center and really become a revenue driver.

Marketers are creating more content than ever before—9 out of 10 companies are doing content marketing—and serving it on more channels than ever before, and unfortunately, they aren’t monetizing it.

This. This is the kicker when it comes to most brands’ #socialmedia. (Thanks for the great slide @JoePulizzi!) #MKTGNATION pic.twitter.com/yvVczsAIAb

— Emily Shannon (@PrettyandPoor) April 24, 2017

Joe’s main point of view? Build an audience, and then monetize your audience. But he didn’t just leave it there, he showed us how to create great content and build an audience and then, using examples from top companies that had successfully made this transition, he showed us how to monetize it. Here are the steps you should follow to ensure you’re creating thoughtful, valuable content that will build a following, and allow you to monetize:

• Identify a sweet-spot—this is the intersection of knowledge/skill and passion/customer pain point
• Find a content tilt—identify if you are actually telling a different story. Can your content be differentiated? Do an actual audit and ask yourself and others, “if this was my main competitor would anyone tell the difference if it was us or them?”
• Create a content marketing mission statement—This should inform everything you do and have three parts: 1) Who’s your core target audience? 2) What will be delivered? 3) What’s the outcome for the audience?
  • Example: Welcome to Digital Photography School—a website with simple tips to help digital camera owners get the most out of their cameras.” Add “audience outcome” for your editorial calendar. You will save time if you focus on the outcome for the audience.
• Create your base—the base is your content type + main platform + consistent delivery + a long period of time. Sorry to break the news, but Joe shared that success is often an 18-24 month process. Why? It takes time to build a loyal audience. (Yay to Boo scale image)
• Monetize—there are five direct and five indirect ways to drive revenue. Your marketing should be a direct profit center; it should pay for itself. Start with one way and then diversify whichever other ways you can.

@JoePulizzi entertaining. Take control of your content & building a media company, own ur audience, dont build on borrowed land #MKTGNATION pic.twitter.com/u50SJNgv2q

— Sian Simpson (@SianSimpson) April 24, 2017

Social Selling

Chief Evangelist & startup advisor, Jill Rowley delivered a crisp and relevant message on the importance of social selling in the Engagement Economy.

Attendees learned a framework for being #CustomerObsessed and #KnowingThyBuyer—and Jill also shared the five pillars of social selling:

1. From resume to reputation—Do you market yourself on LinkedIn as a ‘quota crusher’ and ‘expert negotiator’? Think again—your buyers don’t want to be sold, but everyone is open to being helped. Before you ask for a withdrawal (i.e. 10 minutes on their calendar), you must make deposits by way of adding value.
2. ABC—No, not the famous Glengarry Ross scene, but rather always be connecting. Your network is your net worth. Make sure every LinkedIn invite is personalized and relevant. Leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator to be multi-threaded and find common ground with your pipeline.
3. Content is currency—Use content as fuel for your social selling. Know what your buyer reads and watches. Don’t just share your company’s content, but be down with OPC (you know me!)—other people’s content.
4. Social listening for leads—Filter the noise and distraction of social media so that reps are only listening to relevant updates for people in their world & pipeline.
5. Measure what matters—If you keep measuring the number of sales dials and emails sent in your organization, your reps will keep repeating those same exact behaviors. Instead, sit down with sales management and agree upon a plan to train and invest in your sales team. Sales managers are a force multiplier, and their buy-in is essential to execute a successful social selling program.

With proven performance benefits & ROI of social selling, it is essential that modern sales organizations learn how to create authentic relationships with ideal buyers, optimizing connection while driving revenue for their company. Companies that invest in social selling improve forecast accuracy, total team attainment of quota, & renewal rates, all of which are very important in the subscription economy.

Product Innovation

Cheryl Chavez, GVP Product Management, Marketo, and Matt Zilli, VP Product Marketing, Marketo, closed out Monday’s exciting sessions, drawing cheers from a packed room of marketers as they unveiled Marketo’s exciting new innovations:

1. Platform updates: Big data architecture that’s all about listening.

People are bringing more data into Marketo than ever before. Our new architecture allows for faster execution to succeed in the engagement economy, enabling customers like Politico to deliver a relevant, responsive, and engaging experience at incredible speed — to over 80M customers on Election Night 2016.

2. System monitoring: A fitness tracker for your instance of Marketo—never again wonder what’s under the hood.

System monitoring will allow you to help run campaigns faster and find issues before they happen, including the ability to see Salesforce throughput over time, Smart List performance, and API usage.

3. Analytics: Empower your entire marketing organization with relevant and customizable dashboards. Marketo’s new dashboards will provide:

• CMO Insights
• Revenue attribution tied to marketing performance
• Web insights

This full stack of analytics covers every role, from the everyday marketer to the CMO. Each will have actionable data to use in shaping their marketing strategies.

4. APIs

Get large data sets in and out of Marketo more efficiently with bulk APIs. Whether setting up Marketo for the first time, regularly importing customer data, or exporting Marketo data to your BI tool, you can now get data where it needs to go with ease.

5. Performance statistics: “What’s a good email open rate? Click through rate? Deliverability rate?”

We believe the platform should provide you with a competitive advantage—data that you can’t get anywhere else.

We’ve distilled data from the past five years into key benchmarks, to show you how you’re performing against your peer group and help you optimize for best practices.

6. Ad Bridge

With digital ad spend accounting for roughly 25% of marketers’ budgets, it’s possible to yield significant results with small improvements in ROI & engagement. LinkedIn lead gen forms now sync directly to Marketo. You can also target your audience on LinkedIn with incredibly personalized ads, and keep your ad data fresh with Ad Bridge list sync—automatically syncing Marketo Smart Lists.

7. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Give your sales team the best tools and set them up for success. Account Insights is a browser plugin that surfaces actionable insights to your sales team, so they can work with marketing to engage with accounts effectively. To provide actionable data, we’re also rolling out Auto-Synced Account lists that are in sync whenever changed within your CRM.

8. New UX

A new and personalized My Marketo experience, with a virtual command center for all things Marketo. Add customized widgets to tailor your user experience, then create multiple dashboards and easily switch between them. With updates to UI and functionality from the ground up in key areas such as smart lists, workflows, and nurture programs, this is the coolest and most modern Marketo yet.

Matt and Cheryl emphasized their excitement to deliver these amazing new changes to our customers and prospects and thanks for a being a part of the vibrant Marketing Nation.

And that wraps an amazing day 1 of the Marketing Nation Summit. We’re excited to see what day two brings. Make sure to check back here for a recap of the day two sessions and keynote. Did you hear anything that stuck out to you at Marketing Nation Summit? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

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Live from Marketing Nation Summit: The Engagement Economy, Buyer Empowerment, and Authenticity was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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It’s been a long time coming but MiFID II (MiFID) is almost upon us.

Most people in the industry have been aware of the impending regulations for many years, but were able to brush it aside for a variety of reasons: the implementation date is far in the future / it’s been delayed / we are waiting for further guidance / it might get delayed again … but now it has become a reality and brokers, asset managers and vendors are hurrying to comply with the directives scheduled to go into effect in January 2018. 

By now everyone understands that MiFID II will fundamentally change the business models of brokers and asset managers by unbundling research from execution. In addition the rules also include significant new requirements around pre-and post-trade transparency, transaction reporting, trading venues, best execution, record keeping and surveillance. See recent Greenwich Associates research here for more information.

Yet despite all the focus on MiFID, the plethora of news articles, and the cacophony of seminars, webinars and pop-up events, there are still a few things you might not know about MiFID:

1. Dark Pool Caps could be breached on day 1 of MiFID. The regulations impose volume caps on dark pool executions of 4% in any one venue and 8% across all venues. If these thresholds are breached, dark pool trading in that security is suspended for six months. This much is well known, but what is less well known is that the calculation is based on a rolling 12 month window (which has already started). Many stocks are trading at over 8% in dark pools already, and if that continues throughout the year then the cap will be breached on day 1. However:
2. Regulators don’t have a good way to enforce the dark pool caps. Because there does not exist a consolidated tape in Europe that identifies dark trades. They will likely have to rely on venue self-reporting but have not given any guidance on this.
3. U.S. brokers are prohibited from accepting a ‘hard money’ check. Under U.S. regulations, to accept a payment for research that was not generated by commissions, would require them to register as an investment advisor. They are reluctant to do this as it would impose significant, duplicative regulatory burdens and constraints around proprietary trading and client facilitation. While only 18% of European institutions expect to switch to hard payments, they could potentially see themselves cut off by US brokers. Additionally, there is some doubt whether funds when swept from a CSA to an RPA can still be considered commissions. If not, then US brokers will be prohibited from accepting checks from an RPA account.
4. Asset managers will need to pay for CSA/RPAs. Currently asset managers in Europe do not pay explicitly for CSAs – the cost is either borne by the broker or a small fee is charged on each payment made. Under MiFID rules, absorbing the cost of a CSA would be considered an inducement to trade and will be prohibited. In 2018 CSA funds will need to sweep into an RPA and European asset managers will have to pay a fee for each CSA/RPA – likely a fixed annual cost.
5. Research sold in Europe may be subject to VAT. Value Added Tax is a form of sales tax in Europe. When research is paid from commissions it is VAT exempt, but when it is paid for from hard dollars it will become VAT liable unless an exemption is negotiated. In the UK, for example, this would add 20% onto the cost of research.
6. Asset Managers are Planning Significant Rewrite of Legal Agreements. The changes that MiFID will bring about as so fundamental that they will likely require asset managers to re-write their Investment Management Agreements and amend their Form ADV. This task alone is a significant undertaking for legal departments.
7. Avoiding Cross-subsidization of Research will be a Major Headache. Cross subsidization would occur when research paid for by one fund is used to the benefit of another fund. This could happen unintentionally when a PM sits in on another PM’s analyst meeting. And there are huge challenges to ring-fencing research by client. For example, if different clients of the same fund/strategy agree to different research budgets. Or if the fund/strategy has EU clients and non-EU clients – bundled research for non-EU clients cannot be used to benefit unbundled EU clients.
8. Research Delivery will go from Push to Pull. Turning research off will be a big initiative for asset managers at the end of the year. The current research model involves brokers pushing as much research as they can to a client. In 2018, if a portfolio manager or analyst receives research in their inbox that they did not ask for or budget for they could be in violation of MiFID II. As such asset managers will ask brokers to stop sending research, control access to their research portals and instead will pull research from brokers as needed. 

Richard Johnson is Vice President, Market Structure & Technology at Greenwich Associates.

SEE ALSO: JPMorgan just announced a big shakeup in its trading business

Join the conversation about this story »

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If you have followed business books and literature at all over the last 20 years, you know who Ram Charan is. He is one of the most prolific authors in the genre, and his books always perform a tricky balancing act few can pull off—profound in their insights while also being practical, easy to understand, and immediately actionable.

His latest book, The High-Potential Leader: How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact, is no different. Released late last month by Wiley, it offers real-world lessons and actionable advice that is relevant to both well-seasoned leaders looking to move up yet another rung or make even more of an an impact in their current role, and those just beginning their careers and leadership journeys.

“This is a time for leaders who can thrive in the face of relentless change, complexity, and uncertainly. Many companies have such leaders buried at lower levels. They need to find them, develop them, and find ways to use them to help the company adapt. ‘Born digital’ companies are on the prowl and will gladly poach whatever high-potential talent traditional companies overlook,” Charan explains. “The changes being wrought by things like digitization, algorithms, and data analytics will be as radical as the Industrial Revolution. We’ve already seen companies such as Google and Amazon cause revolutions in consumer behavior and reach the stratosphere in market value in record time. More of these are yet to come, led by people with the capability to conceive and grow them.”

◊◊◊◊◊

If you are one of those leaders who has high potential to lead a large, complex organization, this is your time. Companies need you. Get ready to accelerate your growth by taking charge of it. This book will show you how to build the skills and capabilities you’ll need, and how and when to make big moves that will get you ready and battle test you.

If you’re an HR expert charged with building your company’s leadership pipeline, your job must change. You need a new approach to find and develop leaders who can deal with the immense complexity and challenges businesses face. Using this book as a guide, you will be able to redefine leadership potential and let your high-potential leaders set their own paths. The last chapter will help you rethink your role in supporting them as they drive their own exponential growth.

The Urgent Need for High-Potential Leaders

The biggest concern I hear among senior leaders today is, How can we stay relevant in this increasingly complex and fast-moving world? The truth is, some can’t. They’re not equipped to help their companies reinvent themselves for the new game. Nor are the leaders next in line, who’ve been groomed to fit the same obsolete mold. 

Companies big and small are coming to realize that it will take leaders with a different way of thinking and different skills to reinvent the business. They are having to redefine the very notion of what a successful leader looks like. Now the race is on to find those with high potential to lead the company onto new paths in a world of constant change. 

You’ve heard it before—the changes being wrought by things like digitization, algorithms, and data analytics will be as radical as the Industrial Revolution. We’ve already seen companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon cause revolutions in consumer behavior and reach the stratosphere in market value in record time. More of these are yet to come, led by people with the capacity to conceive and grow them. In a decade, the $72 trillion global economy is on a trajectory to be 50 percent greater than it is today. Products and services not yet invented will give consumers entirely different experiences and make some companies obsolete.

This is a time for leaders who can thrive in the face of relentless change, complexity, and uncertainty. Many companies have such leaders buried at lower levels. They need to find them, develop them, and find ways to use them to help the company adapt. And they need to move fast on this. “Born digital” companies are on the prowl and will gladly poach whatever high-potential talent traditional companies overlook. 

High-potential leaders themselves shouldn’t just sit back and wait to be discovered. They should decide for themselves whether they have what it takes to someday take a large team, business unit, function, or the whole corporation to new heights and make a plan to ready themselves to create the future.

 

What “High Potential” Means Now

Everyone has potential to grow, but not everyone, not even every person with leadership skills, has the potential to lead a large, complex organization in the near and distant future.

Amid everything that is new and different, today’s high-potential leaders, or “hipos,” must be able to identify the untapped opportunities their companies will pursue and mobilize the organization. This is a weakness in many older business leaders today. Understandably. Throughout their careers, growth was defined as improving on things that already existed: increasing profits through cost cutting, tweaking products for adjacent markets, or acquiring other companies in the same industry. More radical changes like reinventing the entire business model, reshaping the entire ecosystem of supply and distribution, or rethinking the entire customer experience have been rare in the life of a company.

It’s now clear that businesses might need to be transformed more than once in a leader’s tenure, and today’s hipos must be prepared for that. They should exhibit three characteristics that the previous generation of leaders did not always need: 

1. They imagine on a large scale. Hipos can take in a ton of information from many different sources and almost instantly find what could be meaningful. In doing so, they pick up clues about what might be possible, and they dream big. In the past, wild dreams or visions of things that don’t yet exist might have been considered delusional, but hipos don’t see it that way. If they personally lack the capability to realize the picture they have in their heads, they know they can use technology, algorithms, and other people’s capabilities to make it real. They are psychologically prepared to scale it up very fast—and go after it fearlessly.
   
   Alphabet, now the umbrella company for Google and other subsidiaries, has a whole population of people who are working to solve the world’s biggest problems. Google X, the semisecret group charged with developing revolutionary ideas, created the driverless car and Google Glass, which is poised to take hold as a key element in the Internet of Things.
   
   It’s not just start-ups that need this kind of imagination. It’s every company. Hipos have it.
   
   
2. They seek what they need to make it happen. I had just finished speaking to a group of executives about how to set up an advisory board when a young man approached me. “Do you have a minute?” he asked. Polite but straightforward, he continued, “I run a small company, much smaller than the corporations you’re used to working with. Would you consider advising me?” It’s no secret that I’ve worked with a lot of big, well-known companies, but he was undaunted. What I came to learn was that he had sized up his market opportunity, and it was huge. He wanted to grow his company very fast and was seeking help building the capacity for it.
   
   Hipos will talk to anyone. They don’t just stay within the hierarchy. A young Steve Jobs didn’t hesitate to call Bill Hewlett, cofounder of tech giant Hewlett-Packard, when he was seeking technical help. Pat Gallagher was young and relatively inexperienced when he was groomed to take over his family’s Chicago-based insurance brokerage in 1983. Having run only the sales force, he wanted to understand what the CEO job entailed, so he reached out to the CEO of McDonnell Douglas, a company far different and much bigger than his own. The CEO took time to talk to him, and Gallagher eventually took his firm to number four in the United States. Forums like the G100 and Singularity University provide opportunities for that.
   
   
3. They understand the concept of the ecosystem. Companies rarely act alone in delivering their product or service. Hipos understand the complex web of participants, from the makers of small parts that go into larger ones to the mom-and-pop shops or FedEx fl eet that delivers the product. Walmart became a juggernaut of low cost because of how it used its tight relationships with suppliers, the largest of which were housed right at the Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters. Walmart schooled its suppliers in state-of-the-art logistics that reduced inventories but kept store shelves stocked with merchandise that turned over very quickly. Both Walmart and the supplier grew, and consumers benefited from low prices.
   
   Digital-age versions of rethinking the business ecosystem abound. Apple’s iPod was a nifty device, but it became a sensation because iTunes changed the way music was packaged, priced, and distributed. Amazon thrives on algorithms that predict a customer’s need and delivers it through an ecosystem of sellers, purchase options, and delivery methods. Hipos have the ability to see the total picture, to conjure a mental image of the web of interrelationships, and to think imaginatively about how to redesign it.

 

Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from The High-Potential Leader: How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact by Ram Charan.
Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This book is available wherever books and ebooks are sold.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author and speaker who has spent the past 35 years working with many top companies, CEOs, and boards of our time. In his work with companies including GE, MeadWestvaco, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Verizon, Aditya Birla Group, Tata Group, GMR, Max Group, Yildiz Holdings, and Grupo RBS, he is known for cutting through the complexity of running a business in today’s fast changing environment to uncover the core business problem. His real-world solutions, shared with millions through his books and articles in top business publications, have been praised for being practical, relevant and highly actionable—the kind of advice you can use Monday morning. Ram was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources and has served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance. He has served on the boards of Hindalco in India, Emaar, Austin Industries, Tyco Electronics, and Fischer and Porter. More at www.ram-charan.com

Is there anything worse than bad TV? You know, the kind of show that sounds just good enough to watch, but once you tune in you can’t get off the couch fast enough? Like Fuller House?!?! It could have been bad in a number of ways (the most obvious being a bad story line), but for whatever reason, if the show was a product and you were a customer — you weren’t buying it. Worse yet, if a network has too many shows like that, it could ruin the ratings for all of them.

The same thing happens when you have bad or boring content. Good content is abundant and easy to access. These days, people don’t have the time or attention span to read boring content. If your writing is not intriguing, people will stop reading it and you can then kiss goodbye any hope of front page real estate on Google. Beyond that, if they feel like too many of your articles are wasting their time, they’ll stop clicking on your content altogether.

Here are the 5 hidden risks of creating boring content.

1. People Stop Reading

There is SO much content available online, and honestly, a lot of it is really bad — boring or useless pieces that make you feel foolish just for clicking on them.

If you are creating boring content on your site, this shows that you don’t know how to market your business. If you can’t create exciting content within your industry, how can you possibly think you will appeal to your desired crowd? Intriguing content is your opportunity to stand away from the crowd — and competitors.

Remember when you are creating content that you should not answer the question “what SHOULD my audience care about,” but “what does my audience care about?” You, unfortunately, don’t get to make the decision about what they find interesting and worthwhile. More often than not, they already know what they are looking for.

2. Creating A Bad First Impression

We sometimes forget to write for our audience. You only have one chance to make a good first impression on new visitors. When creating content, your priority should be your audience. Every piece of content you put out into the ether-world should go through a filter of whether or not your audience would find this information valuable.

Yes, it is important to find good keywords and rank in search results, but that keyword has to correlate to your business and your customer and fulfill the expectation that it is accurate information to the keyword provided. Our job is not to create more content, it is to create the RIGHT content.

3. Wasting Your Time

If no one is reading your blog, it’s a waste of your time. If your blog isn’t answering the questions your audience is looking for, you are wasting their time. It’s about understanding your audience and creating value for them that didn’t exist or wasn’t written well before you put it out there!

According to Todd Henry, in his book The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice, “Anyone can improve his ability to generate good ideas consistently if willing to be a little purposeful in how to approach the creative process.”

I encourage you to get your creative juices flowing because every sentence you put online is a reflection of your company. Have a little fun with it too.

4. Failing to Answer Real Questions

If you aren’t giving the answers to what people are looking for, you will also lose your credibility. Remember the information provided on your site should always be useful to your audience.

I spent a number of years working in marketing for a cleaning distribution company. In the most basic of language, we sold cleaning products to help you clean your toilet. That is an absolute stretch but the point I am making is that there is nothing intriguing or glamorous about selling cleaning products. I was able to create weekly blogs because I found solutions for our audience’s problems. I talked about big picture issues that mattered most to them. Our knowledge and solutions were what kept people coming back to our site, not our hefty supply of bowl swabs and mops.

5. Your Audience Never Converts

In addition to providing intriguing content on your site, you also need to have a strategy to back it up. You must have clarity and insight about your audience and create a logical progression for them to take on your website. If someone is reading a certain blog, what is the next step they can take on your site? Keep directing them down the funnel to more great content. Give them a reason to convert.

Even if you’ve managed to focus on the critical issues that matter most to your prospects, profiled and targeted your ideal customers and identified and engaged your most promising potential change agents, there’s still a very real possibility that you won’t actually create as many short-term opportunities as you might hope.

It turns out that even your best-qualified targets are simply not in an active buying cycle most of the time. Sure, they may download your collateral and form a favourable opinion of your capabilities. But until and unless something happens to challenge the status quo, they are likely to remain passive consumers.

That’s why trigger events are so important: they cause your prospects to take a fresh perspective. They cause them to realise that their current situation may not get them where they now recognise they need to be. They cause them to acknowledge that they may have to change their behaviour…

CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE

Trigger events act as catalysts for change. So if we can work out which trigger events most commonly impact affect our prospects, if we can monitor them in close to real time, and if we can take steps to either create a trigger event or draw the attention of our prospects to the implications of an existing one, it stands to reason that we should be able to identify more well-qualified opportunities.

I’ve written recently about the need to distinguish between irritating, important and critical issues. It’s the critical issues that really drive purchasing intent: they give our prospects no choice - they simply have to change.

COMMON TRIGGER EVENTS

Trigger events can come from within the organisation or from the environment at large. Some of the best examples of internal trigger events include:

• A change in executive management
• A new corporate initiative, or a change in strategy or priorities
• Rapid expansion in headcount or geographical coverage
• The launch of a new and strategically important product or service
• A new funding round, or a new acquisition

But the catalyst for change can also come from outside the organisation. Some of the best examples of external trigger events include:

• New regulation or legislation
• A dramatic change in the competitive landscape
• Significant changes in the economic outlook
• The emergence of other new market forces

Whether internal or external, these trigger events are likely to cause an otherwise well-qualified but passive target organisation to move into a much more active buying mode.

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPLICATIONS

They are likely, for example, to seek to understand the implications of the recent change. They are likely to reconsider their existing strategies and tactics. They may be forced to re-evaluate their existing systems and methods.

They are likely to research and investigate potential solutions. They will probably want to better understand how their peers and competitors have reacted to similar situations. They may well come to the conclusion that they can no longer afford to stick with the status quo.

This represents a critical window of opportunity. If we can engage them while the issue is fresh, while we can still influence their vision of a solution, we put ourselves in a tremendously advantageous position. By getting involved early, we can establish a significant and potentially lasting lead over our competition.

LEARNING FROM OUR CUSTOMERS

So how can get into this position of early influence more often? We can start by going back over our previous wins and interviewing our customers. What caused them to start searching for a solution in the first place? What did they think they were looking for? How did they find us? And what can we do to engage early with similar organisations that find themselves in a similar situation?

What can we do to uncover the evidence that a trigger event has taken place as early as possible? How might we monitor these trigger events? And what can we do to draw a prospect’s attention to the implications of a trigger event even before they had started to consider them?

When it comes to trigger events, as with so much else in successful selling, it’s often the early bird that gets the worm. If we can anticipate, monitor and engage our prospects while the trigger event is still fresh, we give ourselves the best possible chance of winning their business.

So - what significant trigger events are driving YOUR prospect’s change agenda?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and mature corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based growth-phase businesses, equipping and enabling them to systematically create and capture mutually meaningful value in every customer interaction.

Social selling is the art of using social networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects. According to HubSpot, “The use of social media in sales allows salespeople to delight their prospects rather than interrupt their daily lives with cold calls and hard sells, eventually converting them into loyal customers.”

Even though there are an abundance of social media communities, LinkedIn remains one of the most powerful platforms to use for business. LinkedIn, in their own words, says “This sales technique enables better sales lead generation and sales prospecting process and eliminates the need for cold calling. Building and maintaining relationships is easier within the network that you and your customer trust.” They also share intriguing stats regarding the results of social selling:

• Social selling leaders create 45% more sales opportunities.
• Social selling leaders are 51% more likely to hit quota.
• 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media.

So, how can you get the most out of your LinkedIn profile? Here are 5 ways to use LinkedIn for sales prospecting:

1. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

With a couple tweaks, you can turn your LinkedIn profile into a powerful sales asset. The most important thing is that your profile is a 100% complete. There is a high chance that your prospects will look you up if they are interested in what you are selling. When they do, your profile should give off a professional impression of you and your company.

Your headline

LinkedIn automatically populates your headline with your current job title (your headline appears right under your name). To stand out, change this tagline to a value proposition that captures your audience’s attention. Get creative with the 120 characters you have. It should showcase what you bring to the table. Below you can see how I optimized my own headline.

Before:

After:

The new headline highlights “what’s in it for you”, a benefit for the viewer. Let’s be honest, people much rather connect with someone who can do something for them.

Your summary

Don’t make your summary a mere list of tasks you perform at your current job – that’s what job descriptions are for. Use this space to give people a window into who you are and why you do what you do. In order to optimize this part for sales, put the company you work for in a good light. See it as a short, but subtle, sales pitch for your company. Again, avoid being boring and generic, as this is your chance at a great (and authentic) first impression. Check out this example for inspiration:

Your projects & media

LinkedIn allows you to showcase projects that you have worked on. Use this feature! You can add videos, photos, text, and links to highlight your skills. In terms of sales optimization, you should add media to showcase your product or service. For example, if you have a presentation you use for demos, add it to your profile. The profile below is of a Recruiter at Uber, who made sure to include several media links to the brand.

Completing your headline, your summary and your projects is something you can easily do yourself in an afternoon. Another great way to get more traction – but requires a little more effort – is getting recommendations from your existing happy customers. This will help viewers understand what kind of person you are, and what you offer. Note that quality is better than quantity, so reach out to people who will contribute a valuable recommendation.

2. Add Every Customer You Close to Your LinkedIn Network

Whenever you close a customer, you should invite them to join your network. There are various reasons for doing this. First, if you have your customers on LinkedIn, it will be a lot easier to ask someone for that quality recommendation we mentioned earlier. However, even more important is that you will be able to find the right person for a referral to another prospect. All you have to do is visit the prospect’s LinkedIn profile and see if any of your current customers are a shared connection. Finally, it is also a way to keep in touch and maintain a relationship with this customer.

If you find it awkward to directly send a LinkedIn request, ask them in person (or over the phone) with a simple “Can I send you a LinkedIn invitation?” or “Would you like to connect on LinkedIn?”. Most people will be receptive to this type of request. If you do not have an in-person opportunity, make sure to always customize your LinkedIn request. Never send an invitation with the standard text, instead explain why you want to connect with them.

For example, as a Bizness Apps Reseller, you should connect with the small business owners you work with. This way you stay top of mind, and have an easy communication and networking channel set up between you and your customers. By building out this local network of small business owners on LinkedIn, you become the go-to person for mobile solutions in the area – both online and offline.

3. Join and Participate in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups are a great way to connect with your prospects long before you actually reach out to them. Conduct research on what type of groups your current customers, as well as your ideal prospective customers, are a part of. Make a spreadsheet listing all these groups, including the number of members it has, how engaged the group is, and whether it is an open or closed group. Then choose 2 to 3 groups to become an active member of. Note the word active here; you can (and should) join as many groups as possible, but you can only be truly active in some of them. It will take some time and effort, but the idea is to become a thought leader in these groups, proving useful information and advice to its members. So when you do reach out to them, your name is familiar and trustworthy.

In addition, being part of the same group also gives you the perfect reason for making contact with a prospect. Group membership allows you to more easily expand your LinkedIn network.

4. Mine Your LinkedIn Connections for New Customers

As most of us know, collecting emails of prospective customers is easier said than done. This is where LinkedIn comes in handy. Finding someone’s LinkedIn profile is a lot easier than finding someone’s email address. As a result, all you have to do is add someone to your network to get their email address.

How, you ask? One of LinkedIn’s most useful – but least known – features is the ability to export a spreadsheet of all your connections. This file contains your contacts’ full name, email address, current employer, and position!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Click the My Network icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.

2. Click Your connections on the left rail.

3. Click Manage synced and imported contacts near the top right of the page.

4. Under Advanced actions on the right rail, click Export contact.

5. Click Request Archive. You will be asked for your password to complete the action.

6. You will receive an email to your Primary Email address which will include a link where you can download your list of connections.

7. Click the link in the email, bringing you to the archive. Click Download.

8. You will have an entire folder of LinkedIn data, but the most important file is the “Connections.csv”. And TADA, everyone’s contact information!

There you have it, the perfect tool for prospecting, finding referrals, and keeping your customer data up to date.

5. Use LinkedIn’s Dedicated Sales Tool (Paid)

If you want to take it a step further, you can get a premium LinkedIn account with access to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This tool has many useful features to step up your sales game:

• An advanced algorithm to find the prospects best aligned with what you have to offer.
• Sales insights from the sales navigator to ensure that you have the best information as a decision maker.
• Relationship building tools, allowing you to continually move closer to the final goal of making a sale.

Overall, this tool helps you recognize opportunities, as well as capture the right people at the right. The Sales Navigator starts at $64.99/month for an annual account, but LinkedIn does offer a 30-day free trial to get you started.

Social selling is the next big thing. If you aren’t use LinkedIn yet for sales prospecting, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Many people forget that your existing network is a great place to grow your business.

Do you use LinkedIn for sales? Have you seen any measurable results? Let us know in the comments!

Have you ever been in a shop and asked to buy the product cheaper than the displayed price? Or asked for mates rates? Worse still, gone into a shop and told the owner you didn’t have the money to pay right now but you will once you win the lottery? It all sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet you’d be surprised just how many emails and messages I get asking just that! Asking me to work for free. Free!!!!

I asked the question in a group I’m a member of to see if I was the only one that ever experienced this. Turns out I wasn’t and everyone received the same sorts of messages on an ongoing basis. It’s not just a trend. It’s been going on forever and will continue to do so whilst there are still people that will say yes. So, let me explain why it’s the most unprofessional thing you can do. For yourself and your business.

Zero Value

If you are like me and have built your business up from scratch, learning everything yourself, with no help and you’ve done the whole blood, sweat and tears thing. Then why do you want to give away all your hard-earned knowledge and experience for free? I have worked, earning a living, online, through blogging, social media and marketing for 9 years. I’ve watched social media and blogging grow up and come of age. I have watched it all turn into a multibillion-dollar industry. Seen countless trends come and go, platforms vanish as quickly as they arrived. I’ve learnt to code, design websites, the finer, none spam points of SEO, Facebook adverts, what people actually respond to on Instagram, the list goes on. And I did that through time, effort, my own costs and sometimes having to endure terrible clients (that’s a blog post in the making by the way).

When someone asks me to work for free or very cheap, then it shows that they do not see the value in what I do or the knowledge and experience I have. If you as the supplier chose to work for free or cheap then that shows that you do not value yourself or your work. And if that’s the case then how can anyone else ever value you or your work? They won’t.

If you think that what I do, or any other supplier for that matter, is easy, not time-consuming, then please, feel free to jog on and do it yourself. My door won’t be open when you fail miserably and realise it’s not so easy after all. Just because you have a social media login, it doesn’t mean to say you know what you’re doing with it.

Mates Rates

There is a but to the free/cheap argument. And that’s friends and family. This can be a tricky area sometimes. If, and I say if, I offer to help you because you are setting yourself up in business and I admire that in anyone, especially those close to me, then take the offer and don’t negotiate. It’s an offer I am giving you on my terms and not open for you to barter to get more. Unless you are paying me full rate.

I did a job for someone at a reduced rate a couple of years ago. Instead of being grateful that I did them a favour, they bombarded me with irrelevant rubbish and when I asked them for anything I never got what I asked for. They suddenly became “experts” at what I did and felt the need to tell me what to do. They took up far too much of my time for what they were paying me and although I still did the best possible work I could, which proved to be under difficult circumstances, they haven’t been on my Christmas card list since. You will always have difficult customers in business, unfortunately. They are twice as bad when they already have a relationship with you and overstep the professional boundaries we all should have with our work.

Who Are You Again?

The other side to the mates’ rates question is when someone you’ve not seen or spoken to since 1982 suddenly asked you to do a job for them at “mates rates”. This is all well and good if you are just starting out, need the work experience and a few clients under your belt to get you started and said person knows this, has something that needs doing and offers to throw the work in your direction. That is absolutely totally fine and you should thank that person, whilst telling them that next time it will be full price. What isn’t acceptable is when you’ve been established for years and someone you hardly remember ever meeting asks you for “mates rates”.

They aren’t your mate. Double the price for their level of cheek alone! Triple it if they’ve never done anything for you in their entire lives and you see no way of ever recalling this favour either.

If you want to help out a mate or family member, then by all means do. But do it on your terms, not theirs and don’t let them have free reign over you. I don’t care how much cake you buy me.

I Don’t Want To Be Your Business Partner

Another well-worn path to the delete button is those that ask me to be their business partner. In other words, they want me to do all the work upfront for free in return for a share of their future profits. Whoopee! I’m delighted! Because after all, a percentage of nothing amounts to exactly nothing.

I’ve had these requests arrive in my inbox in many different shapes and sizes. From the blatant, ‘I can’t afford to pay you but have the best idea ever’, types. These types need to read my blog post on The Emotional Rollercoaster Of Starting Your Own Business to learn what it’s really like. Then there’s the more interesting, the present it as a work offering and tell me about their great vision. Some of these are quite good ideas so I’ll show some interest. I’ll go through the whole charade of putting together a proposal to then be offered a share of their business in return for doing the work for free. Time wasters! These are annoying. I usually wish bankruptcy on them. They usually all fail and their business never sees the light of day.

What I have learnt from receiving a lot of enquiries and requests such as these is that they tend to come from people who are either employed and are setting something up on the side so already have an income or for some reason think they are better than those they ask to do work for them. They fail to realise that the freelancer or small business they are asking to work for free is already miles ahead of them. They are already surviving in business. The enquirer won’t with that attitude.

No, Seriously, I Do Not Want To Be Your Business Partner

And then there’s the enquiry that just gives me blog fodder. The type that comes laced with a level of sheer arrogance, you know that if they ever did somehow manage to set up a business, it really, really wouldn’t last two minutes.

I’ve been asked to go into business with people that have no plan, no idea, no skills, nothing. Absolutely nothing. But they want me to work with them. On what? That’s when the funny bit happens. They want me to come up with the idea, set the whole thing up, do all the work because they have absolutely no digital skills at all, but think that working online looks easy so they want in, to make some serious money. Yes, I did roll my eyes at that last bit. And then they want me to be their business partner on something I’ve set up. Mind boggles!

Now, forgive me if I’ve missed something here, but, if I had a great idea and was able to set it all up myself, why wouldn’t I just do it myself and not cut anyone in? Why would I give all of that to a stranger or someone I hardly know? If I was going to involve someone then surely I’d pick someone I knew really well and could trust? Or someone that had skills I could use?

And just on the flipside of that one. I have seen some amazing ideas from new businesses. But amazing ideas in the wrong hands tend to fail soon enough. Success comes at a price, and I don’t mean monetary. Nothing and nobody is an overnight success and unless you are willing to put in the work then you will not succeed. And that is a cast iron guarantee.

Can I Just………

The dreaded, can I pick your brains question. Again, I don’t mind this at all if you’re my mate and you’ve lived through starting this business with me and you’re now trying to set your own up too. I’m there with you. But when you’re some random person I could walk past in the street without knowing who you are. No. The answer is – Yes, of course, you can. Here’s the link to book a consultation with me! Yes, that’s right, it charges you too. Buying me coffee just doesn’t cut it.

Know Your Worth. This girl is not cheap

What’s the moral of the story here? Know your worth, set your prices, set your standards and stick to them. Don’t be afraid of turning away work because they try to undercut your fee or the person asking was rude to you. Some people will hire cheap and in digital circles, there are many options to get work done very cheaply. But you are playing roulette with your business if you do that. You are also undermining every other professional person whilst wanting to be treated like a professional business owner yourself.

Before you ask someone to work for free or cheap, ask yourself if you would do it. And be honest with yourself. If you make a product would you give it away for free just because someone asked you for it? If you are currently working for someone and they asked you to not get paid this week because they had the greatest plan ever and you might, maybe, maybe not, get paid next year sometime. Would you do that?

You answered no. Don’t ask others to do it either.

A customer that appreciates your worth, values what you do and understands that they need a professional to do the job is exactly the type of customer you want.

That said, beware of those that then become the nightmare customers. The client/customer relationship should be an equal partnership. Once you begin work you are not the hired help that’s there to be treated with disrespect. More on those types of bad clients in my next blog post. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it.

The idea that complex B2B buying decisions inevitably involve multiple stakeholders is widely acknowledged, even if the number of actively engaged decision makers can sometimes catch sales people unawares.

The authors of “The Challenger Customer” now reckon that an average of 6.8 stakeholders are actively involved in the typical high-value buying decision process – and point out that the number can easily rise into double figures.

But it’s often even more complicated than that – because in many B2B sales you have to convince three key stakeholder groups…

THE CORE BUYING DECISION GROUP

The first group is the obvious one – the core buying decision group. This is the group of people who collectively determine the need for change, define their vision of a solution, identify and evaluate potential solutions, and select their preferred option.

This buying decision group often includes key functional executives, managers and users, financial executives, technical experts and gatekeepers representing departments like IT.

This is the group that most of us recognise we need to target and engage in our sales process. Given that it can be challenging to deal with them all individually, many of us recognise the value in identifying a change agent who can help to bring the different stakeholders together and drive the consensus-building process.

Getting this group to select us as their preferred vendor, and eliminating all other alternative options, is a necessary but sometimes not yet sufficient condition for winning the sale. This is because in many complex buying decisions there are two additional stakeholder groups that tend to get involved, and whose support is critical to our ultimate success.

These additional stakeholder groups are the negotiating terms group and the final approval group. These groups are not mutually exclusive to the core buying decision group, and there are often overlaps between the memberships of these three groups, but we should not assume that they are all obvious members of the initial buying decision group.

THE NEGOTIATING TERMS GROUP

The negotiating terms group often includes procurement and legal specialists who were not necessarily contributors to the initial selection process. Their role is to protect the customer’s interests and ensure that they secure the best possible commercial and legal terms.

The level of influence wielded by this group depends on the balance of power between procurement on the one side and the operation functions that have the business problem on the other, but sometimes have the ability to block or delay the negotiating process.

It’s critically important that we understand how this negotiating terms group is measured and motivated – for example, is the performance of procurement solely evaluated on the level of discount achieved? – and what their relationship with the core buying decision group is like.

THE FINAL APPROVAL GROUP

The last group – the final approval group – certainly has the power and ability to completely derail a project that otherwise has the full support of the buying decision group. This is because they have a much wider perspective than the specific issue that our solution is intended to address.

Even if a budget has notionally been allocated to our project, the final approval group can still decide not to allow the project to proceed. This is because they are responsible for balancing all the various claims from all of the other possible projects that are competing for a finite amount of investment and management attention.

They are also responsible for enforcing high-level company strategy. For example, they may have been persuaded by a major IT vendor that they should adopt their single suite solution – even though the operating departments desperately want to use a more capable best-of-breed specialist approach.

In order to satisfy this final approval group, our sponsors must not only ensure that there is a strong business case and ROI for our project, they also have to demonstrate that the project satisfies company strategy and deserves a higher priority than at least some of the other competing projects.

AVOIDING FALLING AT THE FINAL HURDLE

I’ve seen many apparently “in the bag” sales fall at this critical final hurdle. And it’s particularly galling that in the final analysis our competition isn’t always another vendor but a completely different way of investing the customer’s resources.

That’s why I believe that in complex B2B sales identifying and engaging the obvious core buying decision group isn’t enough to ensure that we emerge with the order. We also need to understand how the negotiating terms and final approval groups contribute to the ultimate outcome…

Following up with Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) can seriously suck! Especially when we only play the numbers game — trying to drive as many names as possible. In this post, I’m going to introduce the solution to this problem — Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) and why they’re absolute GOLD to sales teams. Modern day sales leaders, start paying attention.

The Problem With Marketing Qualified Leads

The problem is that we follow up with leads whose behavior doesn’t necessarily indicate interest in your product. No wonder conversion rates are so low, and getting worse.

Source: Capterra

Many of my peers in Sales & Marketing are struggling with top of funnel issues. Marketing Qualified Leads become a quantity over quality tactic because everyone is desperate to try anything, just adding more and more noise.

And with little context given to the sales person other than the lead source, too many of the follow ups go something like this:

“Hi, this is Emmanuelle from SaaStasstic, I’m calling because I see you downloaded our white paper.”

UGHHH! As a buyer on the other end of this — I want to scream!!!

The new buying reality is that no one buys anything anymore without either:

• Social proof – Reviews, references, recommendations, asking peers, etc. 

or…

• First hand experience –  Which means that our Demand Gen strategies and Account Based Marketing strategies might help create awareness – but they aren’t creating enough buying opportunities.

And the cost to create a lead is skyrocketing…

The New Sales Qualification: Try Before You Buy

More and more companies like Slack, Dropbox, MailChimp, Hootsuite, Optimizely, SurveyMonkey, Skype and of course DigitalOcean all know that there is no better lead than one who’s tried your product.

Even companies like IBM, BMC, EMC and others now offer “Free trials” online. Why? Because we live in an on-demand world and access to information is unparalleled.

These companies know that buyers want first hand experience before making a big purchase.

Guess what else they want: a friction-free process. Buyers don’t want a salesperson holding the keys to the “Proof of Concept”. 

At many of these companies, the salesperson’s job is to convert free-trials or freemium leads into higher spending customers. Unfortunately, too many sales organizations are using the exact same processes they did with MQLs to follow up with these leads. We’ve already proven this doesn’t work. 

While the cost to acquire the lead may be lower, the conversion rates still suck because your sales person sounds like this:

“Hi, this is Emmanuelle from SaaStasstic, I’m calling because I see you downloaded our free trial.”

Sound familiar??

Introducing Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

I wrote an article on LinkedIn introducing the concept of a PQL. In a nutshell, a PQL is a Product Qualified Lead and no, it’s not just another acronym.

The primary benefit of the PQL is that it can give the salesperson a TON of context to know who to follow up with, when to follow up with them and what to say to add value.

However, if all of the rich data from Product Qualified Leads are ignored (or not exposed to the rep) then they’ll fall into the same traps but the impact will be worse – you won’t be pissing off random people who downloaded your white paper, you’ll be pissing off actual customers/users. Ouch!

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) have not already tried your product, while Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) have. Simple distinction. They are very different and need to be treated differently.

I’m building out a PQL model right now — while we’re just starting, I have learned a few things. 

I can’t publicly share results – but I can say that in the first month, we’ve already exceeded expectations and more importantly, we are getting great feedback from the users we are reaching out to.

Building The Product Qualified Lead Model

• This is not just some fancy lead scoring – Don’t sit around in a room and try and make up criteria about what might determine a good lead. Look at the behavior and demographics of your existing larger/more committed/more strategic customers and find commonalities. 

• Get the assistance of a Data Science team – Ensure you’re capturing rich data about your customers and their usage patterns so you can look for ‘triggers”. What features are they using, how often are they using, how many people are using, what volume are they using? The kind of data that can be pulled varies considerably company to company — but if you aren’t using this rich contextual data, you are missing a huge opportunity. If you don’t have a data scientist on staff – get one or check out a company called Whalr.

• Match users against 3rd party databases – Enriching your data is critical (especially if you get a lot of generic email addresses in the sign up process). We match against several data sources including Mattermark, Clearbit, Datanyze and others. 

• Start testing – Learn what converts and what doesn’t. Even the most sophisticated data science models need inputs/results to continue to learn. Consider even having a control groups and doing a lot of A/B testing

• Expose as much as you can to the reps. – In our model, we have the analysis of the leads to determine if it’s a PQL and it’s priority in a Data Science model/database. PQLs then get pushed to Saleforce.com daily but ALL the contextual data does too. That way, the rep is informed. And if he or she wants more info, it’s just one click away to get right into our database of product usage where he or she can explore further to gather even more context

Perfecting The Follow Up

• NEVER offer help if it’s not needed – There’s really nothing worse than “fake help”. Please do not just say “I see you downloaded and want to learn more about your needs”. If you don’t have any relevant context or reason to call, then don’t! In my experience, when there is no context it means the person is likely not going to convert or they’ll reach out on their own when they are ready.

• Do Your Job. Be Helpful! Seems obvious, but these are CUSTOMERS. (Frankly, we should have never treated “leads” like cogs in a process to begin with as we are all just Humans buying and selling to Humans). Your job as a salesperson is to HELP the customer. 

• Time the outreach with when you can offer real help.  

Here’s some examples:

“I noticed that you turned on X feature, here is a great article on how to best leverage this capability”.

“It appears that you are trying to solve XYZ problem based on the fact that you are doing ABC with the product. If you’d like some help with that, we are happy to walk you through some best practices”.

Don’t Sell. Help. 

I repeat, when your “leads” are your “customers” (PQLs), the salesperson does not SELL. The salesperson HELPS. The lines between Sales & Customer Success blur. With the assistance of data science, marketing and some great content, you can transition the experience of following up with leads from the inevitable “No thanks..Hang up” to “I’m glad you called, I’d love your help”.

Music to my ears…

The post Marketing Qualified Leads Are Cool, But I’ll Take Product Qualified Leads Any Day appeared first on Sales Hacker.

No matter the size of your team, clients or projects, account management is one of the most important investments an agency can make. Sure, it’s up to accounting to keep your finances in check; it’s up to creative to keep the ideas flowing; and it’s up to sales and business development to drive new business. However, it’s the responsibility of account managers to ensure clients are kept happy and their goals are being met. In other words, account managers guarantee that business runs smoothly and your agency stays afloat.

To provide the best creative services, you must lay down a solid foundation. And a huge portion of this depends on the ability of account managers to build intelligent, accountable, creative teams. To learn how to build the best creative teams—those who not only produce stellar work, but also support client goals—refer to our tips.

Let the Strengths of Individuals Shine

As the old agency stereotype goes, creatives and account managers are like old, married couples. While relationships can be rocky at times, they are ultimately defined by cohesion and dependence. That’s why it’s important to spend time building rapport with each member of your creative team and working hard to find a balance that yields mutual success.

This depends on your ability to be perceptive of their strengths and shortcomings. Understanding team members on an individual level enables account managers to cater to their specific needs. Setting realistic expectations not only encourages accountability, but it also helps you understand your resource allocation, which ultimately helps guide a project to success.

Implement and Encourage Trust

Respect is the foundation of any good relationship. And the root of respect is trust. Just as clients seek agencies they can trust, your creative team benefits from account managers who work hard to foster an environment of open and honest interpersonal communication. Creatives seek people who not only understand the value of great ideas, but who also appreciate great work and considers it as their own.

As your team’s fearless leader, you must demonstrate you have your team’s back. Furthermore, it’s critical to build upon this foundation and work together to create new opportunities. When creatives know they have your support, they will move forward with confidence.

Lead with Enthusiasm

As any agency veteran can attest to, the life of a creative is full of ups and downs. Projects are rushed, ideas are stretched thin, and budgets are constantly in jeopardy. Plus, it can be downright difficult to produce consistently creative concepts, day in and day out. That’s why account managers need to lead with enthusiasm.

Work hard to create an environment in which problem-solving is natural. Remove roadblocks and set high, yet realistic, expectations. Believe a project can be successful, and encourage the perspective that every project is a chance for your creatives to succeed. Not only is it up to account managers to expect greatness, but it’s up to you to provide exactly what is needed.

Creating an environment founded on passion and enthusiasm leads to an agency driven by similar concepts. Collaborating with and hiring passionate, enthusiastic creatives who aren’t afraid to take risks is the core of successful agencies.

Understanding and Insight

At the end of the day, account managers are managers of expectations. They are the keepers of the project’s budget, scope, and schedule. And they must know exactly what is happening: when, where, why, and how much it will cost.

To truly support client goals, however, account managers must strike a balance between challenging assumptions and meeting expectations. Seventy-six percent of agency executives say their clients are afraid to take risks, and they say they are twice as likely as their clients to feel the best creative can move their businesses (48 percent versus 26 percent).

Knowing what’s right for a client is important, but it’s equally important to always ask “why?” While the end goal of any project is meant to satisfy the needs of your client, sometimes some calculated pushback generates even better results. It’s up to you to reassure your creative team that taking risks can benefit a project. And it’s also up to you to present the strategic advantage to your clients.

The best account managers are smart and savvy, know when to capitalize on an opportunity—even if that means going against the grain—and approach projects from a standpoint that supports both their client’s goals and their creative team’s needs.

Streamlining Communication

It’s never been easier to access information and communicate. Thanks to mobile tools, automated software, and messaging services, it’s entirely possible for employees to stay in touch across the world. However, that doesn’t mean your creative team is communicating effectively.

Between juggling schedules, meetings, and changing client expectations, it can be tough for creatives to remain in the loop at all times. The best account managers work extra diligently to build creative teams who communicate efficiently.

While email and phone will still be a vital part of any agency’s communication strategy, it’s recommended to implement a centralized, internal messaging tool. The ability to communicate in real-time boosts productivity and provides a forum for your team to feel comfortable with each other. And with thousands of options out there, you can easily streamline your agency’s communication efforts.

Utilize Automated Software

Modern technology ensures each detail of your strategic plan is crystal clear to your creative team. These days, agency-specific management tools are designed to increase the productivity and accountability of your entire creative team. Software enables your team to access tasks, schedules, and to-do items—anytime, anywhere. Furthermore, they enable file and document sharing so team members are kept up-to-date on project versions.

From a client perspective, robust agency management software enables account managers to create, edit, view, and print project briefs and reports while still providing the ability to create custom templates. Not only does this customization streamline internal processes, but it also sets your creative team up for success and ensures that clients stay happy.

The best software even incorporates advanced features, such as finance and accounting, resource and traffic management, and sales integrations, to keep your entire agency accounted for. These all-in-one solutions facilitate the ability of your creative team to meet clients’ expectations and goals.

A massive new upgrade to its messaging system just took LinkedIn from afterthought to prime-time player in terms of real-time sales and marketing.

If LinkedIn is just another social media platform you’re checking in on now and again, you’re missing a huge opportunity not only to connect with leads, but to do so in real time.

LinkedIn’s recent revamp includes some key updates and improvements to its messaging features, which is great news for your sales and marketing efforts.

On LinkedIn, using messages for 1-on-1, personalized marketing is critical to fostering the relationships that land you new business.

Finding the Context for a Conversation

You don’t bring a bullhorn to a cocktail party. You also wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date.

So why do professionals behave so differently on social platforms like LinkedIn?

To be clear, LinkedIn is not about spamming the masses and interrupting people by shouting your sales pitch to anyone and everyone within earshot.

Again, you can’t just message someone out of thin air and ask him or her to do business with you. Rather, LinkedIn is all about leveraging a treasure trove of personal and professional data to practice 1-on-1, personalized marketing.

Messaging Magic

If you want to connect with and message someone you don’t know, you should take a quick scan of that person’s profile and find a way to break the ice that doesn’t have to do with business.

Maybe it’s where he or she went to school, or where he or she lives. The idea is to find a unique and personal way to being a new conversation.

Moreover, when you ask someone about his or her hobbies, passions and interests outside of work, it helps build a relationship and context around something important to him or her, which again helps you stand out in that person’s memory. It also paves the way for future messages as a friendly, non-work theme you can weave into each one.

And with LinkedIn’s new messaging features, you can engage in instant conversations right from your prospect’s profile, or wherever else you are on the site, helping you maintain that context.

Maybe you read an interesting article that you want to share with a connection, or you see a relevant post. Even better if you create your own content that your connection would find helpful or relevant to their business, and use LinkedIn’s messaging platform to share it with them.

The key with messaging is to have the right context for the conversation so it flows in an authentic way, without being too sales-y or spammy. The ability to “read” your prospects helps you understand what to engage them about and how to engage them.

And the willingness to make an “ask” at the right time makes all the difference when it comes to converting a lead into a customer.

How the New LinkedIn Messaging Features Work

You used to have to leave what you were doing on LinkedIn to go into messaging, which made it a little clunky to message efficiently. Now in desktop and mobile, you have a messaging pop up window that you can work with wherever you are on the platform, creating a more seamless experience.

Messaging is also enhanced with some automated suggestions for contacts to message as you work in LinkedIn.

For example, if you’re researching a particular company you’d like to do business with, the messenger window will automatically suggest people you’re already connected to who work there, and bring them to the top of the window. In this case, LinkedIn’s done the work for you!

The messenger will also give you suggested text to quickly send messages and replies, saving you more time and energy.

Here’s a video from LinkedIn that demonstrates the new messenger.

Bring on the Warm Leads

Again, if you’re only checking LinkedIn once a week or so, you’re missing a high value opportunity to chat with your professional prospects while they are working. With 500 million members, LinkedIn is the place where your ideal customers are already hanging out looking for resources, news, training, potential vendors and more.

From the new LinkedIn messaging inbox looking and feeling like a text exchange, to users now being able to see when someone else has read your message and/or if they are typing a reply, LinkedIn messaging has become more and more and like a real-time conversation, which is fantastic.

Make sure you don’t miss the boat – start taking advantage of these new opportunities to create real-time, contextual conversations with your ideal prospects over on LinkedIn!

At last year’s Forecast Sales Conference in San Francisco, sales leaders from across the globe gathered to discuss the future of sales and learn more about sales science. During the session Data & Analytics in Sales – The Secret Weapon, Base’s CCO Tal Tsfany spoke with LinkedIn’s SVP of Sales Mike Gamson about the importance and impact of using sales data to guide decision-making.

During his interview, Gamson shared one of his favorite analogies that was developed on the sales team at LinkedIn: Batman vs. beat cop. Essentially, “beat cop” sales reps patrol their territories day after day searching for opportunities. In contrast, “Batman” reps use data to give them “Bat Signals” that guide their way, enabling them to “fly in” and save the day.

Obviously, if given the choice, you would rather be Batman than a beat cop, right!? So how do you quit wasting time patrolling and start using data to shine a light on the prospects and places where you can actually make a difference? Here are a few ways to make it happen.

Real-time Notifications

How often do you find yourself digging through the recesses of your CRM or other sales platforms for information about your current leads and prospects? Did they open that email? How about the attachment? Did they sign the proposal? Constantly trying to keep tabs on everyone in your territory or pipeline can be exhausting, as well as take serious time away from generating new business. Batman would not approve.

Instead, leverage a sales platform that provides real-time, custom notifications. This way, reps and managers alike can go about their days and receive alerts notifying them of activities, occurrences or outcomes that they have defined as significant. This way, you can break out of your “beat” and start focusing your attention where it matters most. Examples of helpful notifications include:

– When a new lead is assigned to you
– When a deal changes pipeline stages
– When a prospect opens or clicks on an email
– When an email is replied to with negative sentiment
– When an attachment is opened or viewed

Predictive Lead Scoring

When you’re staring at a list of hundreds or even thousands of leads, it’s hard to know where to begin. That’s why reps will often just start at the top of the list and work their way down, wasting valuable time on low-quality, low-value leads. As such, one of the best “Bat Signals” you can give your team is lead scoring.

By isolating the key qualities of your best prospects and customers, as well as identifying common traits shared by high-value businesses, predictive lead scoring assigns a numerical value to each of these signals – industry, title, number of employees, etc. The higher the score, the better the fit for your business and the more likely the lead is to eventually convert.

There are many strategies for effectively scoring your leads, one of which is lead yield. By segmenting past deals by different lead dimensions like source, title and industry, and then measuring their yield using a simple formula, you can determine the types of leads generating the most value for your business. Your reps can then work smarter by prioritizing these types of leads above the rest. For a full breakdown of how this is done, check out this blog.

Prescriptive Insights

Besides Robin, of course, Batman’s silver bullet was always having great tools. From the Batmobile to the Batcave, Batman relied heavily on the latest and greatest technology to make him faster and smarter. And your team should too!

One of the most recent developments in sales technology is the introduction of prescriptive insights. Prescriptive sales platforms have the power to dynamically codify and analyze millions of data points at once to isolate the key factors impacting your sales performance. In other words, they alert your team as to the specific, most impactful actions you can take to increase sales growth.

Examples of the types of recommendations prescriptive insights provide include:

– To increase Rep A’s win rate, give him more leads from media/publishing and fewer leads from technology/software.
– Reduce your team’s time-to-first-action from an average of 33 minutes to 17 minutes to generate $150k more per quarter.
– If each rep on your team can increase her average contract value by $5k, you will end the quarter at $35k over plan.

To the Batcave!

If you find that you or your team identify more with beat cops than with Batman, it’s time to make a change. There are enough tools and technologies available to stop walking around in circles and start identifying and approaching the best opportunities for your business, Batman style. If you’re interested in learning more about this sophisticated, scientific approach to sales, download this free resource: Why Your Business Needs the Science of Sales.

Computers are rising.

That’s not a doomsday prediction, by the way. In 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, 85 percent of all customer interactions with the enterprise won’t involve another human. Employees are following suit. Today’s artificial intelligence software is capable of helping employees from both a people standpoint and a hard data standpoint, marrying culture with productivity. Challenges, like absorbing data points and navigating cognitive bias, give way before AI, allowing you to get more done and increase sales effectiveness.

Rob Käll believes that AI can also solve one of the greatest challenges to sales: motivation. “Productivity goes down as you grow your sales team,” Käll says. “As you grow, it’s hard to keep the passion.” Transforming observation into action, Käll created Cien, an app that helps sales teams use AI to fix productivity, improve motivation, and increase sales effectiveness. I had the chance to speak with Käll and get his take on what creates a successful sales team. Here are three factors.

Factor #1: Leads

It would be great if quantity equaled quality, but five minutes looking through leads will remind you otherwise. According to Gleanster Research, only 25 percent of all leads are legitimate and deserve further attention. That means you first have to slog through 75 percent (the haystack) to find the valuables (the needle) if you want any kind of sales effectiveness. Only horses should spend so much time sifting through hay; your employees have better things to do.

With Cien, one of Käll’s goals was to make sorting leads quick and painless. There are some indicators of a good lead that AI can look out for. For example, if a lead has all the traits and behaviors of a successful customer, mark that lead as hot. You can see how valuable it is to you and how much work would be involved in closing it into an actual customer. “AI bots and other AI solutions will better prequalify inbound leads and assist with customer retention,” says Forbes Agency Council member Loren Baker. “Chatbots and messenger bots can lead the lead or concerned user down a path that lets the sales team know exactly what they need from a lead [qualification] perspective.”

Factor #2: People

AI does not remove people from the process; it empowers them to use the process better. A good AI system should tell the employee which leads and opportunities are worth chasing. It can also offer personalized advice (based on research and group experience) on how to improve performance by focusing on specific trouble areas, such as timeliness and follow-up. The employee can also use the AI for daily reminders and lead prioritization, then measure their own performance against team members in the same system.

With AI, you can get to know your employees in ways that a company party just doesn’t facilitate. That’s because AI is primarily useful for monitoring and evaluating. Use AI to measure your team’s success and sales effectiveness, then compare that with logged actions and behaviors that will need to be enforced or corrected (e.g. marketing, inside sales, outside sales, team mood, pricing, etc.). Käll has used his AI to understand those employee character traits that are harder to quantify, like “experience in the industry, product knowledge and industry knowledge, work ethic, and ability to close deals.”

Factor #3: Macro

When you go for a jog, you can’t just dress or plan according to the temperature of your home. As soon as you leave your front door, the conditions change—if it’s raining outside and you haven’t planned accordingly, your jog will be a disaster. Sales work the same way: you can’t plan them based solely on conditions within your company. You need to keep the macro factors in mind. Investopedia defines a macro factor as one that is “pertinent to a broad economy at the regional or national level and affects a large population rather than a few select individuals.” That can mean economic growth, competition, sports results, seasonality, etc.—basically anything outside of your control.

Käll designed Cien to work like a Fitbit for your business: his app gauges a business’s health daily and helps clients plan according to their economic environments. You need to keep the big, macro factors in mind when closing your sales, and AI makes it possible to plan for these factors by recording the macro factors that either help or hurt your business and proposing the actions that have succeeded in the past.

Combining these factors with AI, you’ll find that you can start predicting and calculating things you never could before. Your sales effectiveness can’t help but improve. “How do you incorporate human behavior into a quantitative model?” Käll asks. “There are plenty of learning algorithms out there, but very few take human behavior into account. That’s what sales professionals like about Cien. We give them the ability to see and understand how and why they achieve their goals.”

Your leads are never defined by a single data point; there are a variety of factors that can affect their suitability, behavior, and buying needs. If you are content with tracking your leads based on one category, it’s much more likely you’ll miss a crucial detail that could determine whether or not they are able to internalize your value proposition and connect it to their issues.

Thankfully, tracking your leads across a variety of categories is a simple endeavor, you just have to be willing to put in the effort required to maintain the quality of your data.

Source

By simply knowing where the lead came from, you can instantly discern a lot of information about them. For instance, if they came via a banner ad you already know about some of their browsing habits. If they filled out a contact form that followed from a CTA included with some of your content marketing, then you have an idea about what kinds of content they find value in. Or if they are courtesy of a referral, you can immediately leverage everything you know about the relationship between the lead, the referral source, and your own organization. Not only does tracking your leads by their source give you a jumpstart on your customer research, but it also allows you to better understand which lead development methods are working for your company (and why), and which ones need to be tweaked.

Level of qualification

Disqualifying certain leads is a necessary part of any effective B2B sales or marketing operation. While there will come a point in which the choice is binary — that is, either qualified or unqualified — the issue can often be more complex earlier in the process.

In the beginning of your interactions you may not have a clear answer as to whether or not your lead is worth pursuing further, which is why it is helpful to develop levels of qualification and track them accordingly. This way, you can identify your leads who may be teetering on the brink of disqualification and try to nudge them towards the qualified camp with some effective nurturing.

Sales cycle stage

Your leads have very different needs and expectations depending upon how far along they are in the buying process. They may have reached out ready to begin seriously considering a purchase, or they could have quickly clicked on an ad link out of curiosity. It should come as no surprise that leads expect to have their needs satisfied quickly, whether that involves quenching their curiosity or giving them a quote on a package. After all, companies that follow up with digital leads within five minutes are nine times more likely to make a sale.

Sales reps need to be able to determine what kinds of resources they will need access to in order to drive value in the interaction. When you organize your leads by their place in the buying process, then your salespeople will be empowered to deliver what they need as quickly as possible.

Buyer persona

As we’ve seen, a big part of being successful in B2B sales is facilitating your sales team to get as much high-quality information about their leads as possible, in the shortest amount of time. The more they know about who their buyers are, the easier it will be for them to make informed decisions in an instant that could define relationships for years to come.

There is potentially no category of organization that can tell a salesperson more in a brief moment of time than a buyer persona. If your reps have studied the details of your various personas, then they should be able to internalize numerous data points in an instant, such as demographic info, past buying behavior, estimated budget, and so on. Using buyer personas has been shown to decrease lead conversion time by 72%, so the faster your reps are able to make use of them, the more valuable they will be.

Number of interactions

Relationships can be defined not just by length, but also by the number and quality of interactions that have occurred within it.

Within a three-month period you could have one lead who reached out for information once and then retreated to investigate numerous options and discuss them with other decision makers. It’s also possible to be in contact with a lead who has had several in-depth discussions with the sales team about their needs. These two hypothetical buyers have both known about your company for the same amount of time, but they obviously need to be treated differently.

When you organize your leads by their approximate number of touchpoints, you can quickly assess their level of familiarity with your brand and your products, and therefore leap into a more substantive discussion.

How to Start a Cold Email to Increase Opens and Responses

Learning how to start a cold email and starting a conversation in-person can be difficult to do well.

Maybe it’s the natural introvert, or just the awkwardness of breaking silence, but getting to a point where speech is flowing can be difficult when you’re face to face with someone you don’t know. But when you are looking someone else in the eye and begin to speak—the person almost always responds.

Cold email, on the other hand, is quite different.

If you send a stranger a note straight into their inbox, they have no social obligation to respond and the overwhelming majority won’t even think about getting back to you.

This reality isn’t great if your goal is to talk to leads about your products and services. It takes at least two people talking to qualify as a bona fide conversation. And to your proverbial foot in the door— leads have to respond.

Just like starting a face-to-face conversation there are some effective tricks you can implement by understanding the psychology of your audience and humanity in general.

Today, we’re going to take a hard look at the nature of electronic mail communication by breaking down the psychological elements of successfully starting a good conversation. Aside from learning how to start a cold email, here’s what we also hope to do:

1. Understand the Principles of Persuasion
2. Go over some conversation “hacks” (translating them to email)
3. Talk about the packaging using Justin McGill’s “QVC” framework

By the end you should know how to start a cold email, be able to tweak your own templates, and see a noticeable uptick in your own response rates (not to mention more conversations).

Making Them Feel Like They Have to Respond

In reality, a cold email should be no more than 5 sentences and a post script (p.s.). That’s not a lot of real estate to start a conversation and say enough to prompt further action from a lead.

According to Dr. Robert Cialdini, there are six principles of persuasion. Each one is something that anyone would need to feel or know about you (and/or your brand) in order to move forward in a conversation.

We’ll go over the five principles that really fit for a cold outreach email.

Putting these elements somewhere in your short email can dramatically improve responses. We’ll briefly go over each.

Principle #1: Reciprocation

There couldn’t be a better principle on the list. We’ll spend a lot of time on it.

When you give something (valuable) to someone without before asking for something in return, people will still feel like they owe you.

Too many people forget the “valuable” part.

If you send over a blog post from a third party blog, you won’t get as much as a “gee, thanks.”

But, if you do like some of our more successful clients, and offer a genuinely useful resource that will help them whether or not they continue to speak with you—that’ll work over their conscience.

A 2005 study (the same one we linked to above) by scientist Randy Garner showed that attaching a handwritten post-it note to a marketing survey garnered a 69% response rate as compared to a 34% rate when no note was attached.

How to Pull It Off: Know your leads well enough to know what they want (related to your gizmo). Create a resource that helps them (one that’s better than those at the top of a Google search). Send it to them in your cold email (along with a call-to-action).

Principle #2: Social Proof

Social proof has been around for a long time.

When individuals make decisions, it’s often more of an instinctual process than facts-based. It’s the reason you follow the bulk of the traffic in a detour.

“This many people must know how to get back on the interstate.”

The concept has a ton of different manifestations for your brand. You could have some of your well-known customers’ logos on your homepage, have lots of followers, etc.

But how do you pull this off in 100 words?

“People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.” – Robert Keith Leavit

How to Pull It Off: A fantastic way to show social proof is by linking to a guest post you wrote for a credible source (e.g. “Take a look at my recent post about such and such on Sales Hacker”).

Principle #3: Commitment and Consistency

Getting someone to agree or to make a decision is huge in the buying process.

People naturally want to be consistent, thus, when they make a commitment, they are much more likely to stick with it—or be receptive to future communications.

This fact should drive home the importance of sending something of value to your leads.

If you can get them to open the email, that’s a micro “yes”. If you can get them to visit your resource and engage with it, that’s a bigger “yes”.

All of it setting them up for the response, the “yes” before the ultimate “yes” (aka the close).

How to Pull It Off: Create that thing (resource) that gets them to give you those smaller “yes” commitments, ultimately enticing them psychologically to respond to your email.

Principle #4: Liking

If they like you, you’ll get more of those fence-sitters.

There are some people who have to buy because the product is exactly what they’re needing. Others will choose your solution (over others) simply because they like the rep, personality, or even the style of the brand.

Being good is essential, but being likable should be a close second.

How to Pull It Off: One of the best ways to get someone to like you is to mention something unrelated to business, but specific to your lead. If they live in Austin, TX, mention the food scene. If they’re in Scottsdale (like us) talk about the dry heat. Makes sense? May seem like a throw away sentence, but it’ll help make them like you.

Principle :#5 Authority

If you can convince your leads you are the authority on solving their pain—you’ll often win the account (eventually).

Proving your an authority in a cold email means getting a better response rate. They may not know you that well, but if you’ve shown yourself to be of note on a certain related topic or issue, leads will be much more likely to have that conversation.

How to Pull It Off: A guest post will work here, too (it’s like a twofer to help you save space in that email). Have you not written a guest post? Here’s a resource that will set you on the way.

Putting It All in an Email (Aka the QVC Framework)

Not that QVC.

Getting a few of the points in the previous section across may warm them up to you, but it ain’t going to get them to click reply. To do that, you’ll have to make an irresistible email (including call-to-action) over the course of 4-5 sentences—here are a few things to include.

A Quick Note on Subject Lines

The subject is important. The thing is you already know that.

Yes, you should test and try different lines until you have a great open rate.

Using our face-to-face conversation analogy, subject lines are the doorway into the email coffee shop. The opening of the door you just knocked on.

Essentially, it’s getting the person to the place where you will be speaking with them.

If your subject line misses the mark, learning how to start a cold email won’t matter.

With that said, we want to concentrate on the body of the email— on to the QVC Framework.

Q is for Question

If you do one thing that we suggest in this post, make it this point—DON’T start your email talking about yourself.

Seriously, don’t even think about it.

Everything a lead needs to know should be covered in your email signature. Instead of boring them with your self-promotion, ask them a question that highlights the pain your solution solves and introduces your (or your product’s) ability to solve it.

It’s likely that leads will be able to see this first sentence.

Your subject line is enticing and your first sentence makes the case. When they open it, they’ll be ready to see what you have to say.

V is for Value Proposition

One to three sentences of your best value.

You can let them know why you’re reaching out to them (we love XYZ, or noticed ABC), or that you’ve helped [similar company] increase their [core goal].

Show them the goods and give them something to chew on.

C is for Closing

We’ve talked a lot about how to start a cold email, but the end is critical as well.

You have to ask for a response, or your email is pointless.

The last sentence, like the first, should be a question. Yeah, it probably could have been QVQ, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.

This question should NOT be a repeat of the first.

In fact, it should be the “good cop” of the email (the first being the “just the facts, ma’am question).

Having a hard and soft question is a great way to maximize response rate and gauge how close a lead is to buying.

For a look at the HuffingtonPost article that Justin wrote about all this QVC stuff, click here.

Now You Know How to Start a Cold Email

We’ve taken a brief walk through the mind of your leads, but now it’s time to get that knowledge into the field.

Take the tips, write several templates, create a resource that warms up your prospects. Test and edit everything until you are getting a better than expected open/response rate.

Your open rates should most certainly be over 25% and your response rates, depending on your offer, should be at least be 3% (of total people contacted).

What tips on our list are you currently using? For anyone that knows how to start a cold email, is there anything we missed, or you want to add? Leave them in the comments below!

Driving Your Business with Dashboards written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Imagine tooling down the highway at a high rate of speed without the aid of a dashboard – you wouldn’t know how fast you are going, how your car is doing, even if you had enough gas to get to where you were going.

Just as a dashboard helps power your car – a dashboard is an important tool when it comes to easily accessing how well a business is doing. Measurement is the key to success, but you have to measure what matters. There are so many things we can measure, but some of them are just vanity statistics that really don’t drive our business forward. To make sure you are on the right track to measuring what’s important for your business, I’ve put a list of metrics together that I like to measure and keep an eye on. Hopefully, this will help you when creating which metrics matter for your company.

Key Performance Indicators

A common challenge I hear from many business owners is not knowing what to track and how to track it. It’s important for a business to create a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor that will help to give them a better idea of the health of their company. Move beyond the obvious, like revenue, shares, and likes, and focus on the real drivers that bring money in the door. To identify your KPIs, it’s important that you know your core objectives for the year, and build out your key metrics to track from there.

• Sales revenue
• Attribution channels – what sales channels drove what revenue?
• Cost per lead
• Cost per acquisition

Examples of questions you may need to know include:

• What’s the lifetime value of your customer?
• What’s your marketing ROI?
• What’s your inbound marketing ROI?
• What’s your outbound marketing ROI?
• What’s your traffic to lead ratio? How many website visits does it take to make a sale?
• What search terms drive the most conversions?
• Which marketing campaign drove the most sales?
• How many sales or leads were captured via social media marketing efforts?
• Which commercial drove the most telephone calls?

You also need to identify, what I like to call, your North Star Metric. This is your guiding metric where if you pay full attention to it, more value will be created and you’ll be able to move your business forward.

Types of dashboards

Dashboards are really just tools that allow you to have an easy way to check-in and review your metrics. There are many types of dashboards that you can create, that can revolve around:

• Email
• SEO
• Advertising
• Social

There are some tremendous tools available for small businesses at a very low cost to create these dashboards. One of my favorites is a tool called Cyfe, which is an all-in-one online business dashboard that allows you to monitor social media, analytics, marketing, sales, support, infrastructure…the works! I’m also a fan of Gecko Board and Google Analytics Dashboards. You can also check out Dashboard Junkie for some ready-made dashboards and tracking ideas.

For internal purposes, having the right information easily accessible is more important than making your dashboards look pretty. In fact, I just use Google Sheets to create my dashboards of internal tracking, like referrals.

Want to learn more? Join us on May 15 for our next system webinar that will go into more depth about driving business with dashboards. Click here to register.

What tools do you use to create your dashboards? What is your North Star Metric?

How are your email marketing campaigns doing? Are you seeing the results you seek, or could they use improvement? These email marketing campaign upgrades can be just what you need. If you want your email campaigns to bring the best results, use these 7 techniques and their best practices to achieve them.

When you create each of your email campaigns, what are you focusing on? If you’re not paying attention to each of these areas, your emails are not going to reach their best potential. It’s time you create fully optimized emails for your recipients, and this article gives you everything you need to know.

Get the email marketing eBook that goes along with this article:

The Complete Email Marketing Guide

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1) Welcome Emails

Your welcome email is the start of something big: lead nurturing. Unfortunately, many times this is a missed opportunity businesses do not appreciate. When you create an effective welcome email for your new leads, you increase their engagement and loyalty – thus preventing spam reports, inactive subscribers, and unsubscribes.

Important note

Your welcome email needs to go to your new subscribers (leads) right away after they submit their information. Don’t wait a day or even an hour to send a welcome message. The longer you wait, the more likely your lead forgot that they signed up and thus, the more likely they’ll report your email as spam or unsubscribe.

The following elements of a welcome email are all essential. You may choose to prioritize some over the others, and that’s fine. It’s important you create an email that will appeal to your specific audience. The important part to remember though is:

Your audience is the basis for what you include in your email and how you express that information. It is not the time for your own business preferences.

Take advantage of as many of these email elements to create a welcoming experience for your new leads. Make something they will appreciate and use.

Set clear expectations

Your new leads will be wary of what they just signed up for and what it means. You can easily ease their concerns by clearly telling them what to expect from you.

How many emails will you send out each week?

What types of content do you typically include?

It can also help to give your new subscribers a link to customize what types of content they get and how often. For example: if they only want one email a week instead of every day, give them the option to select that. If they only want blog articles instead of event updates, let them choose that preference.

The more freedom you give for your subscribers to customize their emails, the better your campaign results will be. If you keep sending emails they don’t want or are not interested in, you’ll see a decline in positive results and an increase in negative reactions.

Share value

This can come in several forms: blog articles, gated resources, or in-email advice. In your welcome email, you want to offer something of value that your recipients will appreciate and engage with. It’s an important way for you to determine which leads are most active and likely most interested in your business.

Important side note

When you create a welcome email, it will hopefully be customized in a way that makes it relevant to that specific lead. In other words, a lead that came from your blog should get a different welcome email than a lead that came from an advertisement or landing page.

Back to sharing value

Your welcome email recipients should see clickable resources that they can use to solve a need. You can share 1-2 of your most popular blog articles to give them an idea of what they’ll receive in the future. Or, share a gated offering that is relevant to the content they converted on. It would help if the gated offering was immediately accessible instead of requiring another form completion.

Sharing value in your welcome email helps your recipients understand the content they can expect from you. It also gives them immediate help whether as a blog article or other content type.

Notify of your social media presence

Although this part doesn’t need a dominant space in your email, you should still include it. Even if you add the links in your signature or as buttons at the bottom of your email, you need to add them. This will help with your social growth and engagement. Plus, your recipients may have their own active presence on the same platforms as your business. They may want quick access to your accounts so they can follow you.

Social media is huge and can bring in leads on its own. It can also show you which email leads are most interested in engaging with your business. They may be the most likely leads for future sales.

Ask for their input

Giving your audience a voice – a say – in what they receive from you is a powerful way to build their trust and loyalty. You don’t want to do this if you can’t honor the advice you get, but if you ask strategic questions, it can work.

Sometimes you may be tempted to create an external survey that people go to and fill out. Your welcome email is not the time for that. Instead, ask one specific question within your email that people answer by replying directly. This is one of those reasons why you don’t ever want to use a no-reply from address for your marketing emails.

Alternatively, you can use a link, but make it a one-click way of answering your question. For example, if you ask a yes or no question, give your recipients two buttons or links to choose from. When they select “yes” or “no,” you can simply lead them to a thank you page to confirm you received their answer.

One great approach to a question in a welcome email is to be completely random. Asking them what challenges they face or what their favorite industry topic is can help you with future segmentation and targeted emails. However, you can build rapport and show personality when you ask them about their lives or recreational interests.

Bonus tip

Don’t forget to answer your random question too as the person sending your email, whether it’s you or the CEO. It’ll help prompt more replies and bring personality to your email. When you ask a question about favorites, make sure you have an answer of your own to include. This may require getting input from the official email sender.

Secondary bonus tip

Your welcome email should absolutely have a human sender, not just your company name. You’re welcoming your recipients, and this needs a human “face.” Use the email tone and signature to show recipients that an actual human being created your email, not a robot.

Provide social proof

A great way to convince recipients that they made the right choice to subscribe is to show them social proof. Give real-life examples of people who have appreciated your business. Use existing blog comments for subscribers to see that you offer popular insight. Use client testimonials if your welcome email is more targeted toward lead nurturing for sales.

As an example, I often use a past work supervisor’s words as proof of my writing capabilities. In some initial emails to potential employers, I add a short clip from a recommendation letter she wrote for me:

“Annaliese’s ability to understand the structure of good writing is a natural skill that can’t necessarily be taught. She is talented in her ability to compose concise, intelligent prose that informs, educates and leads the reader to the article’s intended focus.”

Although a slightly different scenario than what marketing emails are for, the lesson still applies. Add quotes (testimonials) in your welcome email to give proof that you’ve successfully helped others through your blog, product, or service.

Offer social sharing options

If you want your welcome email message to spread, include social sharing options. Let your recipients easily share what you said with their own networks. Let them spread the word of your blog, product, or service. Your welcome email should make it clear what you’re all about, so your recipients will be able to share who you are and what you offer with only 1-2 clicks.

When you allow social sharing options in your emails, even beyond the welcome, you increase your audience size simply through word-of-mouth. WOM is one of the best ways to get trusted attention, so give your already loyal subscribers the power to spread your message.

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2) Segmentation and Personalization

You’re not sending one email to your entire database each time, right? Yes, that’s the easiest approach, but it’s also the most ineffective and potentially damaging. Let’s take a moment to go through the importance and processes of both segmentation and personalization.

Segmentation

Definition

The process of dividing your contacts into groups, or “segments,” based on set behaviors or demographics. Most segmentation happens when contacts sign up initially through a form on your website.

Benefits

When you segment your contacts into separate lists, you give each and every recipient an email message that fits with their needs and interests. No one is left out or sent irrelevant information. You thus help prevent spam reports and unsubscribes.

Additionally:

1)Your open rates will increase.

2)You’ll see more people click through on your calls-to-action.

3)People will be more likely to convert on your offer.

4)You’ll simply make a bigger impact.

Methods

You can segment in many ways. Start simple by asking for an industry in the initial form. You can make it more complex by following web behavior. It can be difficult to gauge what you want to segment and what is too much, so I recommend this thorough list by HubSpot: 30 Ways to Slice Your Email Database for Better Email List Segmentation. HubSpot explains each method, giving you what you need to understand which approach works and why. You can use this article as a great start by experimenting with the methods that could most benefit your campaigns and goals.

Best practices

Use your web forms to their fullest potential. If you only ask for an email address, don’t expect to have many ways of segmenting. Instead, ask for the typical first name, last name, and maybe a job title or phone number. You also want to ask for information you can’t get from their behavior on your website, such as industry or which content types they prefer to receive.

Don’t wait to segment till your contacts database is a mess. When you have a long list of email addresses with no other data, it’ll be pretty difficult to gain that information for segmentation. You will only have a few options:

-Keep emailing them with generic messages

-Ask them for more information, making them have to do extra work

-Wait and gather behavioral data over time from the few recipients who engage with your blast emails

None of those options are ideal or even all that effective for your marketing success. That’s why it’s so important to gather the information you need from the get-go. Then, as you segment your emails, continue to track and adjust as you measure their behavior.

Personalization

Methods

It can be as simple as using their first name when addressing them. Use it in the subject line for extra good measure. Too often I see forms that don’t divide the full name into first and last. You need to do that so you can personalize by first name without excess manual work.

Mention something they last did, such as abandoning a cart or downloading an eBook. Let them know you care about their business or personal needs by bringing up the challenge they told you about in a form. Make the experience personal by using behavioral data to send a personalized message.

Whether you’re using standard form information or behavioral data (or both), you can use it to send messages that fit their interests and solve their needs.

Best practices

To put it simply: the most important best practice for personalization is to make sure you’re actually implementing it. You want to deliver a positive experience to gain (more) business from your contacts. If you just blast out the same generic email that has no personalization tactics, good luck getting people to act on it. If you’re able to get people to open your email, make sure your email itself is worthwhile to each and every person you contacted. Use personalization to achieve this.

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3) Design

You now know more about the welcome email and both segmentation and personalization. Now, let’s dive into email design best practices. Although there are definitely more elements to an email than these five, I focus on these because they’re either the most important or most neglected.

Subject Line

If you want your email opened, you have to convince your recipients that it’s worth their time. Create a subject line that is both convincing and relevant. Use a catchy subject line to stand out in their inbox. Use relevance to reassure them that the email has purpose and isn’t spam.

Best practices

Keep it short to allow for full view without cutoff. This is important for both mobile and desktop view. The ideal subject line length is no longer than 50 characters.

Make it clear what the email is about – what its purpose is. Don’t try to trick people into opening your email by deceiving them in the subject line. Clickbait won’t lead to any good. Be honest, and for good measure, tell them why they might like the email contents based on what you know about them.

Use actionable words. People respond better to subject lines that prompt them to open the email. It can be out of curiosity, from time pressure, or any other means as long as you’re providing honest value. Your subject line and call-to-action are very similar in this way. They both require prompting recipients through actionable language.

If you want your email to reach recipients’ inbox and not the junk folder, don’t overdo it with the CAPS LOCK. People don’t want to see an all-caps subject line, so make sure you’re balancing it out. Use all lowercase or only capitalize the first letter of each word.

Another easy way to end up as spam is to use the wrong words, such as “Free” or any of these other trigger words listed by HubSpot. Be careful what words you’re using. If they’re too salesy in nature, they’re probably a trigger for spam filters. I like to refer to the HubSpot list (link above) when writing my subject lines to make sure I’m not using any trigger words. You can also do a Google search on “email subject line spam words” to find other resources about this.

Preheader

This is one of those commonly neglected areas of an email. GetResponse explains that in their article, which I’ve linked to for your reference.

While your subject line is that big bold text you see first, there’s still that other text right next door or immediately below. If it just says “open email in a browser window” or something just as generic, you aren’t using one of the best tools for getting people to open your email.

Let’s go through a few of the best tips for using preheader text in your emails.

• End your preheader text with an intentional cliffhanger to spike curiosity.
• Mention the benefits within the email that your subject line doesn’t already say.
• Tell recipients what they’ll see inside the email via a short description.
• Use any personalization data you have to grab each recipient’s attention.

Images

This is an often misused feature in emails. Or, it’s an element that isn’t thought-through enough. For example, when you use images, keep in mind that they may not actually appear when recipients open your email. Gmail blocks images until the recipient gives the okay to see them. That’s why creating an email that’s just one big image is not recommended.

Best practices

Limit how many images you use in your emails. Sometimes, all you need to include is a company logo and one relevant image for design. Even if a recipient can see your images, they don’t want to be overwhelmed by them.

Take full advantage of alt-text when setting up any images. Use descriptive language to tell recipients what the image was of and for. Or, use the alt-text as an opportunity to get recipients to give the okay to view images. You could use alt-text to emphasize other points, but it’s best to keep it relevant to the image that’s meant to be there.

Again, do not create an email that’s just one big image. Many of your recipients won’t be able to see what it’s about, or they’ll choose not to view it. You also risk being sent straight to people’s spam folders automatically. Make sure you’re focusing on adding copy to your email as your primary. Images come secondary.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

All your emails must have a call-to-action (CTA) to give it purpose. Why else are you sending them? A CTA should be an inline link or button for recipients to click on. It’s how you’ll gauge interest and engagement. You’ll better understand which recipients are interested in which offers. This will ultimately help you with segmentation, personalization, and most importantly, sales readiness.

Best practices

Give priority to an inline text link as your CTA. If your email has other images, you can include a button CTA too but not instead. Back to earlier, not all recipients will see images in your emails, so make sure they can see and click on your CTA regardless.

Make your CTA stand out from the rest of the text and email. Give it its own place, even if it’s a text link. This will help visually and also give mobile viewers more room to select it. If it’s a button, make it noticeable by using bold colors and a large shape.

Use actionable language in your CTA link text. Give recipients a clear reason why they should click through. What’s in it for them? Be honest, direct, and clear. This isn’t like your subject line where certain words are banned, but you should still be careful which words you include. Just like email providers, your recipients won’t like a sales-y tone.

Signature

Another heavily neglected part of a marketing email, your email signature holds such great potential. You can emphasize the person behind the email, helping your email have a more human-feel. It’s a great way to add to your email copy’s personality.

Best practices

Make sure you’re using the same name as you’ve used for the from name and email address. It would be silly to receive an email from Frank with a signature naming Mary.

Include more than just a name. Include a job title and maybe even their social media profiles, especially if they’re a company executive. If you have more personal information, such as a favorite quote or a headshot, include that in the signature. People will appreciate seeing the face behind the email, and a simple quote or saying is a great way to add personality from the sender.

On the other hand, don’t overcrowd the signature. For example, if your email only has one link (the CTA) within the body, that’s not the time to include links in the signature. You want recipients to click on your CTA first, but other links will distract them from doing that.

Other elements to pay close attention to when designing your email

• From name and email address
• Your email copy
• Any links besides your CTA
• Social media sharing and account links
• Your email footer

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4) Tests and Measurements

Your email campaigns won’t lead anywhere if you ignore these two activities. You can’t see each campaign’s effectiveness if you don’t measure, and you won’t know how to improve if you don’t test. These two parts of your email campaign are essential for discovering what’s working and how it affects your marketing bottom line.

Test

The best way to test your emails is through A/B Testing. It’s the most common and effective approach.

What is A/B testing?

The process of making one change to your emails at a time, making two versions of your email, and measuring their performance to see which version is most effective.

What should you test?

You have many options here, and you should ideally evaluate and test each one over time. You’re never finished testing because there’s no such thing as the perfect email.

Use these as examples of what you can test:

-Call-to-Action copy, placement, or design

-Your email subject line and / or preheader

-Image selection and placement

-Email layout

-Email extras, such as including social proof or other bonus elements

Measure

To properly measure your email campaign performance, you need to establish which metrics matter most to your goals. If you’re looking for engagement from your email, open rates are key. If you’re looking for conversions, the click-through rate is important.

What other metrics matter?

Conversion rate:

The next step after recipients click-through from your email’s CTA; it’s when your recipients complete the action you’ve set your goals on, such as filling out a form on your website or making a purchase.

Bounce rate:

The emails that do not go through to the recipient’s inbox; a hard bounce happens when an email address is invalid while a soft bounce could just mean the recipient’s inbox is full.

Spam reports:

When your email is marked as spam either by the recipient or email client; you don’t want to get too many of these because it can damage your deliverability and in a worst case scenario, get you locked out from your email marketing provider.

Hopefully, you’re using an email marketing service, such as MailChimp, that will show you your metric results automatically to take away the manual work of measurement. If you have to do the math yourself, use the formulas in this email metrics guide by HubSpot. They explain how you can calculate some of the most important metrics from your email campaigns.

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5) Strategy

The most important question to answer once you have your email ready to go is: when are you going to send it? This is a key part of your email campaign strategy. If you send your email at the wrong time, it doesn’t matter how much work you put into the subject line and internal email design. It won’t reach it’s fullest potential. Your email may get lost in the recipient’s inbox. It might arrive at a time that will annoy your recipients. You don’t want that.

Although there is not a single best time to send an email, you can use these studies CoSchedule compiled as a great starting point. However, you’ll want to adjust as needed based on your business, industry, and recipient preferences. What works for some may not work for you. It’s all about experimentation, such as the A/B testing mentioned earlier.

So what are some of the best times to send an email (from CoSchedule’s collection)?

Tuesday seems to be the best day of the week for emails. Wednesday is a popular second-place option from the majority of studies. Thursday is the best day to send a second email.

10am is the best time of day to send your email. That or sometime in the late-morning range. You may also consider first thing in the morning (6am) or end of day (8pm) because people are likely to check their emails at these times. A more unusual time that may work is around 2pm because people might be looking for distractions from work.

The CoSchedule article offers a checklist you can use to find your own best days and times to send emails. It lists the various days / times in a most effective to least effective order based on the different studies included. Use that checklist for your own emails to find out which day and time works best for you and, more importantly, your recipients.

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6) Incorporations

Email marketing doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) be just a silo within your overall marketing strategy. You can use other marketing areas to enhance your email campaigns, such as social media and events. The best incorporation is to use other marketing tactics to increase subscriber count, loyalty, and word-of-mouth.

Social Media

When you’re properly active on social media, you have a loyal following that’s eager to hear from you. You have an opportunity to use that eagerness to your advantage.

Use social media to spread the word about your email newsletter to get people to subscribe. Link to a landing page that makes it easy for people to subscribe – avoiding excess information. You’ll want to let them know the benefits of subscribing, but keep it simple.

An even better way to get your Facebook audience to subscribe is to add a form to your Page’s tabs. MailChimp gives you this option, and it’s a quick and easy way to get Facebook users to subscribe without having to leave the platform.

Yes, you may want to offer something to your social media audience to convince them to subscribe. It could be a download, a free trial, a webinar sign up… The importance should be on getting that conversion, so the method in which you get that is simply a matter of what works for you.

Events

When you’re at or hosting a conference, make sure you’re giving attendees a quick and easy way to sign up for your emails. There’s technology out there that can make this a quick and seamless process. You can have them sign up on a tablet at your booth, or use a scanner, for example.

Whichever way you choose to collect people’s information, make sure they are aware of what you’ll be sending to them. Tell them what to expect to prevent spam reports and unsubscribes, which can be common with post-event email campaigns.

While you’re at a conference, it may also help in the long-term to promote the landing page where people can subscribe on their own time. Add the link as a QR code on your handouts, or use another means. However, don’t simply write out the URL all over the place because that can look messy even when shortened.

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7) Cleanliness

Last but not least, make sure you’re keeping your email database clean. List hygiene is important for your campaign deliverability. If you have a long list of inactive subscribers and soft bounces, this can hurt your email campaigns. It’ll lower the chances your emails will reach those recipients who would engage.

The first technique for cleaning your lists is to reach out to inactive subscribers. Instead of simply deleting them from the start, try to get them to re-engage. See if there’s still hope for their attention. You can use a blunt subject line where you ask straight away whether they still want to hear from you. Hopefully, they’ll at least open the email, which lets you know that they’re seeing your emails. Ideally, they’ll answer your question with a “yes.” If they say no or don’t respond, remove them.

The second technique for cleaning your lists involves internal investigation. Are you properly segmenting your lists? Do your subject lines work? Before you start purging, make sure it’s not a problem on your end.

If you’re still seeing a lot of inactive users, consider removing them, especially if they’ve been inactive from the get go. When you keep your lists full of healthy contacts (active and engaging recipients), you improve your email deliverability as well as your other important metrics.

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Well, there you have it: the 7 best ways to enhance your email marketing campaigns for best results. If you want to see real results that help you achieve your email marketing goals, use these tips.

There’s more to learn about email marketing best practices, so why not get the guide that gives you everything you need and more? Find the email marketing guide here.

The discussion about using content as a lead generation tool has been significant and impactful in recent years. However, a topic that is often under-discussed is the importance of leveraging quality content in your lead nurturing.

Prospects attracted by your quality online content remain interested in useful, relevant information as the selling process continues.

The following some of the best tips for using content in lead nurturing to help turn prospects into satisfied customers.

Establish Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is the notion that your brand and representatives are on the cutting-edge of innovative ideas and activities within a particular industry. As business buyers carry out a deliberate, problem-solving process, their primary interests are often more in the way of identifying contemporary methods for resolving issues.

There are a lot of great tools available for your business reps to demonstrate expertise and thought leadership. Consistent insight-sharing on social media is one example.

However, to achieve real nurturing influence, you have to go beyond simple daily postings. Get engaged in in-depth conversations through such tools as LinkedIn group discussions or Reddit communities.

Other digital media are designed to connect topical experts with people looking for answers to particular questions. Quora, Inbound.org, Medium, beBee are all popular tools whereby company representatives, all the way up to CEOs and other executives, can answer questions posed by interested parties. On some of these forums, you can search for questions on topics related to your industry or business, and share a well-developed and useful answer.

Offer In-Depth Information and Resources

As buyers shift from the initial awareness stage of their journey to the evaluation stage, their desire for more comprehensive information increases. Therefore, your lead-nurturing content should include formats and messages that dig deeper than what you typically deliver at the lead generation stage.

59% of B2B companies say creating relevant content is their biggest obstacle to lead nurturing success – Ascend2 study (Dec 2015)

Original Research Reports – During the evaluation stage, prospects are especially influenced by proof points, including data, stats, and facts that support the need for a remedy and best possible alternatives. While you can share second-hand information, developing and distributing original research reports furthers your objective of establishing thought leadership. It also allows you to share data that is not available elsewhere, which could achieve a greater impact on a prospect’s decision.

Podcasts – Think beyond copy with B2B lead nurturing content. Podcasts and videos allow you to offer more personalised, in-depth and interactive content experiences for intrigued prospects. With HTML5 video technology, some companies are embedding videos in their email marketing campaigns to contacts. Within a podcast, you can offer more thorough insights on the prospect’s problem, share case study success stories, identify possible alternatives for configuring a solution, and emphasise a sense of urgency in taking action.

Slide Decks – A slide deck or slide show is a way of presenting information to prospects with a multi-sensory appeal. You can present content in a concise manner in slides, and then offer narration and other add-on features to enhance the consumption experience. Marketers often convert presentations into slide decks and then upload them to sites like SlideShare.net, or distribute them directly to prospects in the lead nurturing phase.

Transition from Education to Product/Sales Information

The goal of lead nurturing during the prospect evaluation stage is to effectively set up the transition from education to sharing of product information. You can’t rush this process, or you put off a buyer taking his time to learn and gather resources. However, you don’t want to miss an opportunity by never making this transition either.

Along with those previously discussed, the following are some additional content mechanisms that do particularly well at helping marketers and sales reps transition.

Webinars – In a product webinar, you have the chance to map out your content to cover the entire process of moving the prospect from evaluation to decision. Because of the time commitment, a business buyer typically only participates in a product webinar when he realises a significant problem exists, and he’s ready to consider remedies.

In your webinar, spend some type outlining the common types of problems that your solution resolves. Then, discuss your company’s approach to resolution, including any distinct technology or features that you use. Finally, close out the webinar with a more detailed look at your solution and how the prospect should respond to discuss it more.

Case Studies – During lead nurturing, it is common that buyers begin to want proof after they understand the possibility that the right solution exists. Proof relieves risks, helps shift focus away from process, and removes hesitation. Case studies, which outline how your solution has satisfied a customer with a similar need, are among the best B2B proof devices. Buyers want to know that you have helped other companies facing problems like their own.

Demo Videos – Live videos are another important proof device. Videos allow you to address uncertainty from the “evaluating” buyer by illustrating processes or showing how a solution works. In B2B, it is often difficult to tangibly prove product performance. In those cases, testimonials from satisfied clients work well.

Wrap Up

Many leads that arrive into your sales funnel are not sales-ready. But that doesn’t mean you should simply ignore them if they don’t close within a stipulated timeframe. Lead nurturing is a powerful way to stay engaged with your future buyers. It’s coordinating the most appropriate content for each process of the buyer’s journey.

A buyer shifting from the lead generation funnel to your lead nurturing funnel is similar to a fish taking the bait and the fisherman trying to reel it in. In both cases, the strategies and actions that work in the transition stage are different from those necessary to create the initial interest.

During lead nurturing, prospects want to see that your company has the credibility and expertise to offer a relevant solution to a problem. Buyers are also in search of more in-depth knowledge so they can make a decision with greater peace of mind. Thus, selecting the right types of content tools for B2B lead nurturing is as important as delivering solid lead generation content.

And remember, this is a buyer-driven market we are in. Get your content, messaging and timings right, and you will be on the road to lead nurturing success.

What’s the problem with these so-called “trends” that crop up in the digital marketing space each year?

A few things: being on-trend doesn’t guarantee long-term success, buzz doesn’t always equal sales, and focusing too much on trends can keep you from putting your budget and energy where it really matters.

That’s not to say there aren’t good articles on marketing trends out there. That’s not to say there aren’t completely valid and effective marketing trends that you should stay in the know about.

What we’re saying is this: a constant struggle to stay trendy in the marketing space could cloud your judgment and keep you constantly chasing after that newest, shiniest thing, when really long-term focus on the basics is what’ll get you the strongest and steadiest results.

Here are 5 trends to steer clear of this year, either because they’re all based on empty hype or because there are more important things to worry about first.

1. A Ruthless Slew of Pop-Ups

Oh, and do you mind if we send you notifications? Even though this is the first time you’ve ever laid eyes on our site and you’ve only been here for .2 seconds and you don’t even know who we are yet?

Stuff like this—pop ups and requests to allow browser notifications—is downright invasive. They can be done right—that’s true. But most of the time, they aren’t.

What’s worse, lazy and disingenuous attempts to connect like these often only leads to companies inadvertently distancing themselves from potential customers. In the dating world, tactics like these might even be called desperate.

Some people even claim that popups are the doorway straight to hell.

I’m not saying you should never use popups, but first, consider the buyer’s journey. What reason do they have to sign up for your this thing! or that! or any kind of lasting personal contact with you before they’ve even spent a minute on your website? None. Just none.

As far as trying to build meaningful and symbiotic relationships online goes, it’s a shot in the dark. You might get lucky and get another newsletter sign up, sure—but is it really a potential customer that wants to form a relationship? Or is it just someone who gave you a junk email address? Are you wasting each other’s time?

What to do instead: Earn their trust first. Give them a reason to initiate a relationship and they will. Make it easy for them to sign up, sure—but you don’t have to be in-your-face about it. Take a subtle approach and if you choose to do one, select an exit intent form that comes up when they are leaving the page. This way you are not interrupting any aspect of their browsing experience and for heavens sake, don’t insert a popup on a mobile phone!

Use content marketing and prove your value to your visitors. Then—I promise you—they won’t mind scrolling to the bottom of the page or using the sidebar to enter their emails in a sign up box that isn’t a flashy and bothersome pop up.

2. Keywords! Meta! And Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks!

This one’s about content marketing. All these are solid SEO strategies, no doubt about it. (As far as trends go, this one’s pretty longstanding—still, it’s on its way out anyway.)

The problem is when we’re so focused on these technical SEO tactics that we forget that what really matters is what we’re saying. Who we’re talking to. What content they need to see.

In the mad dash to impress the Googlebot, often we forget to care about whether or not we’re connecting with an actual person. (Oh, and by the way—Googlebot is getting smarter every year and will only continue to become less easily fooled over time.)

We definitely do want you to care about your keyword use, meta tags, and backlink use. They’re basic SEO tactics because they work.

What we don’t want you to forget? That ultimately, SEO always comes back to the people on the other side of the screen. And that content is the strategy; keywords, meta, and backlinks are just the tools.

Try this first: Remember that it’s not just about attracting a lot of visitors—it’s about attracting the right visitors. So relax—you don’t need to hit big numbers right off the bat.

Focus on producing the right content first. Focus on your target market’s needs first. Once you’ve got a good handle on that, then you can worry about covering all the other bases. Be natural about it and shoot for genuine helpfulness now; go back and add in the meta and backlinks later.

In the meantime? Try a simple plugin like Yoast, or the embedded SEO tools that Hubspot provides which gives feedback on a webpage’s SEO effectiveness. You don’t need to put too much stock into it for now; just having the plugin and peeking at it before you hit publish will give you an idea if you’re on the right track, even if you’re sticking to the basics first.

3. Use THIS new social media platform. And THIS one. And THIS one.

Until you’re trying to juggle a million balls in the air. And you end up dropping a few. And then you drop all of them. And then one of them falls into the dark and empty pit that is Silicon Valley’s collection of lost and broken toys.

Is it just me or is there something new that we must! join! now! just about every year?

I’m not saying all new social media platforms are doomed to fail, but I am saying that you should stay wary and not automatically assume that every single one of them is worth your time and resources. And it’s not just about whether or not they have a proven track record and seem likely to stick around (and even when they do have a strong track record, it’s never a sure thing; look at Vine!)—it’s also about your business. Your customers.

Should you use Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, Medium, or Tumblr? Should you even be using all of the big guys like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn? For most B2B business the answer is yes to the big four however your strategy for each should be unique.

Again, it depends. On what you do, on what you sell, on what your customers want. It’s something you’ll have to decide yourself.

Just remember this. In order for you to succeed on a greater number of platforms, 1 of 2 things have to happen: 1) you’ve got to put more time, effort and money into social media strategy or 2) you’ve got to settle with a diluted social media presence. There’s no way around this tradeoff, so choose wisely when it comes to deciding how many platforms you’ll stay active on.

We recommend: Figure out where your customers are and follow them. Focus on the must-haves first, the top 1 to 4 platforms your customers use and love. Tackle those first, worry about the rest later.

4. Video Content is the Meaning of Life

There are market studies proving that video marketing works. Can’t argue with that. We especially believe that video, when produced properly, can make a personal connection with website visitors, but it has to fit into your overall content strategy.

But will video work for everyone? What about the small-teamed, small-budget startup that blows their whole budget on a 90-second video? Will it work for them?

We don’t know, and that’s just the thing—video can be expensive, and so inherently involves more risk than other content types. Marketing through different mediums is always a tradeoff: if you’re blowing your whole budget on a marketing video you’re not even sure will work (and how could you be absolutely sure?), you’re spending less on other marketing strategies. That’s the nature of scarcity and eggs and baskets and all that, my friends.

Reading an article on how video content is the new golden goose of marketing and assuming it’s automatically right for you is careless. Take ownership for your marketing strategy, do some research first and then decide how video fits into it.

Instead, try this: If you’re a small venture, content marketing comes in many forms, and it makes more business sense to start with less expensive forms like blog posts, graphics, and PDF downloadable assets like info guides, case studies, and worksheets. Create the foundation of the content you need to address the questions that modern buyers have at each stage of their journey for information. Once that is in place, if you have a content need that is served best by video, then invest enough to produce a high quality result. After all, that video must represent your brand properly.

5. EVERYTHING Mobile, Everything Apps, Everything Trendy

Last year it seemed like everyone with a keyboard was blogging about how Pokémon GO was the big new marketing tool that we all needed to be using, especially for B2C businesses.

My big beef with the all the Pokémon GO hype? Articles from high places like Forbes and Entrepreneur spoke of Pokémon GO with so much fervency that they made it sound like everyone should be using it—and you’re not using it, brace yourself for some serious FOMO and missed marketing opportunities and don’t be surprised when you look like an out-of-touch person.

But what if your customers are…well, business executive that has no interest in Pokémon GO? Or the busy saleswoman who doesn’t spend a lot of time gaming on her phone? Or the guy who just doesn’t like video games? Or the B2B person who mostly uses a desktop computer at work?

I’m not saying responsive web design isn’t a necessity, because it is. But impeccable responsive design, an app store presence, and mobile app strategy through Pokémon GO should not be your first priorities; responsive SEO hygiene should be your #1. (Are you noticing the trend, here? Basics first, always.)

Try this first: Before you go throwing money at website overhaul that boasts impeccable responsive design, focus on good mobile SEO hygiene. Of course, if your website is way out of date then your best bet might be a new design that also addresses the mobile responsive requirement.

Skepticism Is the Best Trend

And it doesn’t need to be an angry and negative type of skepticism. But viewing the marketing landscape with an optimistic and open-minded skepticism is a great way to weed out the stuff that won’t matter in the long haul and to call out marketing noise for what it is—empty hype.

Then you get to focus on the important stuff. The stuff that counts. The stuff that works.

Our biggest piece of advice is this: don’t substitute a think piece on marketing trends—which a lot of them are, unfortunately, and not actually based on research—for doing your own real market research and thinking through your own target personas and what they want.

Because we want real customers. Real connections. We want customers that want to sail along happily through our sales funnels getting exactly what they need from us. What we don’t need are the big, faceless, (and often non-paying) numbers that often come from chasing trends.

So try this instead: focus on genuine engagement and marketing basics first.

That’s when connection happens—a real connection that’s sure to stick around long after the latest trend fades into short-lived marketing history. We favor the Inbound Marketing methodology because it is genuine and provides value to the website visitor with every touch. If you are new to Inbound, then consider downloading this free guide.

Image Copyright: alexmillos / 123RF Stock Photo

“TAM” is one of those buzzy acronyms that VCs love to throw around. For those following along at home, TAM = Total Addressable Market. It helps paint the picture of how big the opportunity is and if the business deserves to be venture backed.

TAM is a funny thing. Early on, many investors passed on Uber, wrongly seeing it as little more than a black car service for affluent San Franciscans.

The type of analysis that led many to overlook Uber (when it was still called UberCab) mirrors the approach that Benchmark’s Bill Gurley criticized NYU professor Aswath Damodaran for a couple years later in a piece called “How to Miss By A Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size”

“Let’s first dive into the TAM assumption. In choosing to use the historical size of the taxi and limousine market, Damodaran is making an implicit assumption that the future will look quite like the past.” – Bill Gurley

The most forward thinking investors were able to see past the limited size of the initial niche targeted by the company and see something closer to what the company has become — a $60+ billion valuation with operations in 67 countries and offerings ranging from food delivery to carpooling.

Where Does Your Total Addressable Market Start (and End)?

Before calculating the actual size of the market you are looking to capture, you first need to try to build an understanding of where that market begins and ends.

Many companies, like Uber, start out in a specific niche with plans to scale into adjacent markets that allow them to apply their product and operational expertise to a different set of customers or a different geographic location. However, taking a company that is excelling in one niche and extrapolating their growth across multiple markets is a difficult task for both companies and the investors evaluating them.

“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.” – Peter Thiel, Zero to One

One year ago, Uber’s Gross Revenue in San Francisco was $500 million. Assuming a 20% cut, we get to just $100 million a year. 5 years ago, connecting the dots forward to see how they could move from that to what they have since become took a combination of masterful storytelling from Travis Kalanick and his team as well as a large leap of faith by the investors evaluating them. This is a potential pitfall of using a TAM based on historical market sizes for truly game-changing businesses (as Gurley’s quote from above illustrates).

Another oft-committed mistake surfaces with many eCommerce companies, who claim to be chasing the $1.6 trillion global eCommerce market. Sure, it is a huge number. But it is one that investors will see right through, much like highly inflated financial projections or overly ambitious product roadmaps. In reality, most eCommerce businesses are addressing the X $ spent each year on Y problem(s).

Why Knowing Your Total Addressable Market is Important

Going through a market sizing and pricing exercise can help shape your business and the decisions you make when it comes to your go-to-market strategy. How many customers are there in our market? What is their propensity to pay? How many customers can we realistically support? What % of the market can we get in 10 years? Can we be the market leader?

Visible recently went through this exercise as we were modeling TAM for the company market we were going after. I ended up with something that looks like this:

I shared this with team members, investors and advisors. The feedback I got was, “Wow this is awesome, I haven’t seen it displayed like this before”. I quickly thanked my K201 class back from my IU days and then decided we should “Open Source” this and make it available to other companies so they don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

Building Your Total Addressable Market Model

Access the free Market Sizing, TAM & Sensitivity Analysis template here along with full instructions on how to build your own model.

The post Modeling Your Total Addressable Market [Free Template] appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In our MarketingProfs article, Marketing Activity Metrics Mean Little: Here’s How to Really Prove Marketing’s Value, we asserted that “marketers need to be smarter about the performance metrics they select.” We also found ourselves concurring with David Dodd’s claim that “many senior leaders are no longer satisfied with the tactical performance indicators (campaign response rates, content downloads, etc.) that marketers have traditionally used to describe marketing performance.” From these two sentiments (and a lot of other research) we have concluded that far too many Marketing metrics are tied to activities and efficiency rather than Marketing effectiveness.

A Forrester study, Winning In The Connected World: How Aligning Finance And Marketing Will Drive Business Success, found that CFOs want Marketing to “measure the effectiveness of Marketing” related to the overall organization’s financial goals. The traditional metrics of measuring ROI and reducing spend, on the other hand, were at the bottom of the CFOs short list.

Marketers making headway on measuring their effectiveness to the business are taking an outcome-based approach to their metrics. Operating in this fashion allows Marketers to tether their measurement data to key business outcomes and drive the organization’s financial goals.

It is also those same Marketers who are focused on being effective and are able to work the numbers to most accurately track and report on their performance.

How To Take Your First 5 Steps Towards Effectiveness

1. Own your company’s positioning

Creating customer value is directly tied to your company’s bottom line. Customer value is a financial calculation and it is increasingly seen as a key source of competitive advantage and a basic ingredient for the company’s positioning. Effective Marketing organizations know how to create a value proposition that is superior to and more profitable than those of their competitors. In fact, Trout and Ries introduced us to the idea that a company positioned as the leader gets about 50% of the market, No. 2 gets 25%, No. 3 gets 12.5%, and the rest of the competitors split the remaining 12.5%.

2. Focus Marketing on real value creation activities

Establish and own a sustainable process of value creation. Take the lead on keeping conversations and investments focused on developing a continuous stream of products and services that offer unique and compelling benefits to your customers. Some of your first efforts might include, but shouldn’t be limited to, product and process efforts, gaining insight into the needs of well-defined segments, harnessing data and analytics to accelerate efforts within existing markets or creating new markets, and reconfiguring company and/or industry value chains.

If your current work doesn’t meet the above criteria, discuss where it fits among the priorities for Marketing and readjust.

3. Serve as an integral member of the business team

As marketers, we talk a lot about demand generation, marketing channels and attribution, marketing activities (such as content, social, email, brand, search marketing, etc.) and customer engagement. However, marketers who want to be effective have realized that it takes more. Marketing must also be an integral part of the business.

Effective marketers speak the language of business and talk about how Marketing can facilitate business growth by acquiring and demonstrating business acumen.

4. Develop a deep understanding of strategy

Effective Marketing organizations guide strategy. Strategy selection provides focus and enables an organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that create a sustainable competitive advantage to support pursuing and securing the best value creation opportunities. It provides the guidance and direction for channeling the organization’s precious, and often limited, Marketing resources to generate market traction, penetration, and dominance.

5. Define measures of success tied to effectiveness, value, and impact

We started this post by saying that marketers need to be smarter about metrics. Hopefully, we’ve made it clear that choosing the right measures is far more important than the quantity of data measured. While there are many ways to approach this task, one way to make sure you keep your focus on the right measurements is to have a Marketing measurement playbook.

Your marketing measurement playbook should provide you with a strategic approach for building your measurement processes, selecting metrics that emphasize effectiveness, reporting those metrics in a way that delivers real business value, and executing the right activities to continue to improve over time.

You’ve all heard that the money is in the list. And that’s all fine and good, but the hard part is actually getting people on that list.

The fact of the matter is, getting subscribers isn’t as easy as it used to be. People are much more wary about giving away their email addresses. That doesn’t mean having the list is any less important, you have to work a bit harder to get it done.

One way to do that is through lead magnets. A good lead magnet can tip the scales in your favor and get people interested in your list.

In this post, we’re going to cover lead magnets. Sure, you’ve seen these posts before.

But here’s the difference: this is all about lead magnets that you, the beginner, can create today. If you’ve been wanting to find ways to build your list that isn’t too hard or time-consuming, keep reading.

Sure, you’ve seen these posts before. But here’s the difference: this is all about lead magnets that you, the beginner, can create today. If you’ve been wanting to find ways to build your list that isn’t too hard or time-consuming, keep reading.

What is a Lead Magnet?

Let’s start with the basics.

What is a lead magnet?

Here’s how we’d define it:

A lead magnet is a high quality (some might say irresistible) free offer to people who visit your website in exchange for their email. Ideally, the big goal is to really attract qualified leads to start building trust between you and your readers.

So these offers do a couple of important things:

• They make that first touch in your relationship about giving something of value.
• They get people on your email list.
• They have readers start seeing you as an expert in your field.

Alright, now you know what a lead magnet is. The next part is all about creating them. Gone are the days where you can say ‘subscribe to my newsletter’ and get a bunch of readers. You need more now.

So you do need to put a little bit of thought into your lead magnet before you create it.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you create yours:

• High value: Forget about creating anything that doesn’t offer value to your readers. Ideally, you want something that solves one simple problem from the start. This is a great way to get people invested in you as someone who can help them.
• Quick and easy: Another key about a lead magnet is you want it to be quick to read and easy to digest. That’s why things like checklists or templates work well. Just because your lead magnet might only be a page or two doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
• Specific: You are creating a lead magnet for your ideal customer. That means your lead magnet has to speak directly to them. You can create multiple lead magnets but you want each one to be specific to your customer and their problems.
• No BS: Don’t lie about what you are giving people. Don’t bait and switch or sign them up for extra stuff they never wanted in the first place. Be honest with exactly what you are going to give them and what they are going to get once they are on your list. Build trust from the start.

Have a good idea about lead magnets now?

Good, because we’re going to get to the real juice of the post.

How to Create a Lead Magnet

In this section, I want to show you specific examples and show you how to create a lead magnet that will work for you. Showing rather than telling serves a couple of purposes.

First, I think seeing examples works better than describing them. You can see each of these lead magnets in action. Second, I picked lead magnets that you can create easily.

Most of you are likely somewhat new to the world of lead magnets and they can feel complex and overwhelming. They don’t have to be which is why I specifically picked these examples.

Alright, ready to take a look?

Checklists

A checklist is one of the easiest lead magnets you can do. They are quick and simple to create. You can literally create a one or two pager, and share via your email service provider.

Checklists also hit a bunch of the guidelines above. They are easy to digest, solves a specific problem, and provides a lot of value.

Here’s an example from my freelance writing site. This is a checklist that covers a list of places where you can promote a blog post after it gets published.

My checklist lead magnet speaks directly to the people I work with: B2B brands. And it offers specific advice on how they can promote their blog posts. This solves a problem that a lot of brands face pretty easily.

How to Make a Checklist

Open up a standard Google Doc. Type up a little intro to your checklist that reminds people of what it is and highlights how you want them to use it. Here’s an example of the one I created above:

Next, create your checklist. Select the bullet points and pick the one with the boxes from the drop-down box. Write out your steps. I like to leave a few blank spaces with boxes next to them for people who want to fill in their own.

Save as a pdf. Upload into your email service provider.

Simple, right?

Cheat Sheet

This is another winner. People love using proven formulas that have already worked. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of something and makes life easier.

So, if you have a bit of experience in something already and have seen some success, use that information as a way to educate others as a cheat sheet.

Check out the below example from Jon Morrow’s site, SmartBlogger. Right at the top of the page, you’ll see the “Headline Hacks” cheat sheet.

This speaks right to the audience needs, people who want to write better blog posts. It solves their problem by giving them headline ideas in one simple booklet.

How to Make a Cheat Sheet

Once again, hit up Google Docs.

Next, type up your cheat sheet. I think the thing to really pay attention to when it comes to cheat sheets is they need to be powerful, no fluff.

Remember, what you write is going to be the ‘secret sauce’ for people to use to get ahead. They can be longer than a page or two. You don’t need to spend 15 pages introducing things, just give them the good stuff.

As soon as you’ve finished typing out your cheat sheet, do the same as above. Save and upload to your email service provider. If you have a longer cheat sheet, consider using PowerPoint or Keynote too.

Tips

People love tips. That’s just a fact of life.

Here’s where you can use your relative expertise. Show off your skills by offering tips (or tricks or strategies) to people who sign up to your list. This is another easy way to offer people something that is going to help them improve their lives/businesses quickly.

If someone can use even one or two of your tips and see an improvement, you’ve already won.

Here’s a really simple example from Brian Dean of Backlinko. He has a welcome mat that offers simple tips to people who sign up.

What really helps Brian here is that since he’s positioned himself as an SEO expert, you don’t need much pushing to sign up. You know that his tips will teach you something new and help you improve your site.

How to Make a Tips Sheet

Creating a tip sheet lead magnet follows the same instructions as before. The easiest way to create one is to go with a Google Doc. Again, have a little intro to welcome people, highlight what they are going to get and give them any instructions for how to use it.

Like with cheat sheets, a tips sheet also needs to be powerful and to the point. This is something that can literally just be a bunch of bullet points that features key tips.

As soon as you’ve finished typing out your tips sheet, do the same as above. Save as a PDF, Powerpoint, or Keynote and upload to your email service provider.

Another way to use this tips method is to create it through an email newsletter. You can have a ‘tips’ series that is sent out weekly.

Resource List or Toolkit

This is another easy one to create that still gives a lot of value. Use you can create a lead magnet that highlights the resources or tools you use to run your business and would help other people run theirs as well.

We can use Location Rebel Arsenal as an example of a toolkit or resource list. The arsenal is a giant list of all the tools we use to work from anywhere in the world.

Sean created the arsenal because so many people were always asking how he was able to get work done and travel at the same time. If you want to be a digital nomad, it can be a common problem. So this list helps solve that problem right from the start.

How to Make a Resource List or Toolkit

Resource lists and toolkits can end up being a bit more in depth compared to the posts above. While those are usually a few pages these can get much longer.

So, you can use Google Docs to create them. Or you can make them appear a bit fancier by going the Keynote, PowerPoint, or Beacon as options. These are going to feel more like guides or books and have a nicer look.

What you want to do is once again welcome everyone and give them information on what’s happening. And then keep it simple.

Highlight your resources and tools one by one. Make sure to link them so people can click from the list and go. Also, include a sentence or two on how you’ve used each of these to help you.

Once you’ve finished, save, pdf that bad boy and upload to your email service provider.

Planner

This is a great one to use especially if you’re working in the health or fitness area. Lots of people need help with getting their schedule and planning set up. So if you’re able to create a simple 7-day, 14-day, or 30-day planner it’s something people can love.

Check out this meal planner from Joel Runyon’s Ultimate Paleo Guide. He offers a 7-day paleo meal planner for people to check out the paleo diet lifestyle.

Here’s another easy to digest problem solver.

A lot of people want to get into Paleo but don’t know where to start or what kinds of food to eat. By trying it out for 7 days with a meal by meal guide it helps get people much more invested.

Even if you aren’t in health or fitness you can still use planners. Try them for anything that needs a schedule.

How to Make a Planner

There are a couple of ways you can approach a planner. One of the easier ways is to make a calendar template and fill that in with the information you want to share. You can then make a second one in the ‘package’ that is blank so people can fill them out themselves.

You can also use Google Sheets or Excel to create a planner too. Going with this method will give you two options to share. You can offer it the standard way, as a PDF.

Or if you use Sheets/Excel, you can share the link to a shared sheet. When you do it this way, let people know that they need to file->make a copy. Then they will be able to have their own copy of the sheet that they can fill in and edit for themselves.

Sharing this is simple. You still want to have that main welcome sheet. So if you use Google Docs for that, include the link on the Doc and let them know if they on the link they’ll be brought to the sheets. You can upload your Doc into your email service provider as normal.

Final Thoughts

Alright, these are five simple lead magnets you can create this week.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the thought of building your email list, you’ve got everything you need here to get started. Follow the steps and, you can get each of these up and running and be well on your way to building your email list.

Times are changing. Keeping up with the content demands of successful brand, audience and content marketing can be challenging even for the most experienced and qualified brands and marketers.

Brands big and small are getting more savvy at embracing new media and the ever changing social media and communication channels and formats such as live streaming video, recorded video, audio, visual marketing, blogging, micro-blogging and the list goes on.

Do you ever feel as though there is no human way you can create the content needed to make your brand and marketing successful as it can be?

One way you can gain immediate traction and competitive advantage is to work with influencers in your industry or niche to create partnered content with them. This can be referred to as co-created content marketing. It is a great way to increase your own brand awareness, thought leadership and better achieve your goals if done right.

A recent study conducted by Linqia showed that 57% of brand respondents indicated influencer content has proven to outperform their own brand created content!

The same study also found that 86% of marketers use influencer marketing as part of their content strategy. 88.5% of them find influencer content to be a valuable part of their overall marketing plan.

Not only does influencer content and co-created content increase efficiencies in regard to cost and time savings, but it can also be more impactful and could possibly better inspire your customers, prospective customers and broader audience and community if implemented properly.

The truth is your prospects, customers, online audience and social network communities are bombarded by information, news and media. There is not a lack of Facebook Live Videos to watch and engage in, webinars to learn from, Instagram stories to laugh at, Tweet chats to converse in, blogs to read or podcasts to listen to!

How do you stand out from the crowd? How do you rise above the noise?

One of the best ways to rise above the boring sea of status quo and never ending tweets and mundane advice is to bring together some of the greatest minds in your industry or niche to co-create content that is relevant, unique, timely and of high value to your ideal target customer, audience and community.

Co-created content is not just a buzzword or the next new shiny object that will solve your business problems. It’s also not something you should run off and implement as a Random Act of Marketing (RAM) disconnected from your overall business goals, objectives and strategic marketing plan.

If developed and implemented correctly co-created content can help you drive efficiencies in developing and taking to market content that will help you ignite relationships, inspire your audience to connect with you organically and achieve your business goals.

Would you like to better understand how to develop co-created content working with influencers and internal employee advocates to zoom real business results? If yes, then this episode of today’s Social Zoom Factor podcast is for you.

In this 25 minute podcast you will learn:

• The definition of co-created content (simplified even for newbies!)
• Steps you need to take to kickoff, develop and succeed when launching a co-crated content marketing program
• How to choose the right influencers, to create the right content for the right audiences, goals and objectives
• Business benefits of co-created content
• How to develop a co-creation content marketing plan
• How to identify the best influencers to work with your brand
• How to work with influencers to create co-created content
• How to engage employees and external influencers together to create co-created content
• Why your focus for both content and influencers should be quality over quantity
• Why the ability to drive real action is a requirement when choosing influencers
• Finding the sweet spot for co-created content when working with external influencers and internal employee evangelists

Thanks to social media, reaching people that are beyond our physical touch is possible these days. And no industry has been better in putting these platforms into use like the marketing industry.

Whether it’s liking their latest status update or tweets or mentioning their name in the comments section of your viral post, social media platforms have enabled marketers to bring customer experience to a whole new level. From Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest, social media networks have enabled a lot of big brands and fresh start-ups to interact with their target audience with much greater precision and accurateness, which brings their brand closer – at a more personal level – to consumers.

To sum up, here is the summary from the infographic below from Digital Marketing Philippines which discuss the ways you can improve your social marketing skills in 2017. Knowing these tips will not only help you keep updated with the latest approaches in social media, but also reinvent yourself as well to ensure that your brand will get more traction across different social platforms this year and beyond.

1. Go deep not broad. Choose the most optimal website and develop a deep engagement level with your market there.
2. Focus on the influencers. Connect with relevant influencers and seek their help in distributing your content to a new audience.
3. Make your videos more sophisticated. Make your videos short but packed with information or entertainment value.
4. Optimize your Facebook ads- further. Spending a few dollars to jumpstart your video in the social media world is never a wrong decision.
5. Grow your audience. Use social media tools to find and follow relevant users on various social media platforms.
6. Switch up content formats. Instead of sticking to text-based content, try to use other formats such as video and slideshow presentations.
7. Build relationship. Ask questions, start a discussion and respond to their comments, these are the ways you should not miss when engaging with your followers in social media.
8. Never forget the law of patience – Getting good results from social media is not going to happen quickly, you need to be patient in what you do and stick to it until you see arrive to your goals and objectives.

To learn more, check out the infographic below:

Embedded from Digital Marketing Philippines.

A great sales call depends on what we at Sandler Training call an up-front contract.

If you’re not familiar with the term, an up-front contract is a verbal agreement reached between two or more people in advance that outlines what’s expected of both parties. In the inbound selling world, this contract unfolds in seconds.

We’ll get you up to speed on upfront contract best practices, their importance, and when to use them.

Skip to:

• Upfront Contract Definition
• Importance of Upfront Contracts
• Upfront Contract Techniques
• Examples
  
  

An upfront contract doesn’t mean that your prospect is signing a deal after an initial meet. Think of upfront contracts as a mutual agreement. It’s more of a mutual agreement where both parties understand what’s expected of them and any next steps.

Importance of Upfront Contracts

Upfront contracts set the expectations for what’s to come ahead of time and ensure everyone is on the same page. You can ask the prospect questions to make setting the contract up flow naturally. For example, you can ask them if they’d like you to follow up and what day or time works best.

That way, at the end of the meeting or call, you can say “Thank you for meeting with me. Just to confirm, I will follow up with you Tuesday at 3 p.m. to discuss the proposal and address any roadblocks.”

They are also helpful for you to get a better understanding of what a prospect’s needs are prior to sending a proposal. Taking this step will prevent launching into a proposal early that doesn’t align with the prospect’s needs.

When to Use Them

When should you use an upfront contract? Every meeting or call. As Sandler Training Consultant Joe Ippolito stated on the How to Succeed Podcast, it helps to think of an upfront contract as the book ends of a meeting — like the bread on a sandwich — it holds the important stuff together.

Make sure at the end of every call you have some sort of upfront contract for what happens next. This could be a mutual agreement to set up another meeting, send over a contract or nail down details for a follow-up.

Your initial interaction with the prospect has to entice them enough that they want to be on that call or meeting with you. This isn’t something you can force. It has to be adapted to the situation. Next, we’ll look at some techniques you can use when setting an upfront contract.

Upfront Contract Techniques

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for this. You’ll need to be nimble and adapt your upfront contract to each situation you encounter. Below are a few techniques you use when speaking to a prospect to get your upfront contract going.

1. Start with what Ippolito calls a ‘mini’ upfront contract.

For this, gauge the prospect's expectations at the beginning of your interaction rather than the end.

Example

“Hi [prospect name]. I know we have a 30-minute meeting scheduled, but before we get started, what you like to get out of the next half hour?

Get the prospect’s agenda instead of just laying out yours. This will help you later when you can include the prospect’s points in an upfront contract for next steps. It will also help you align your agenda with their goals, saving you both time.

2. Involve other stakeholders.

In order to get a deal done, more than likely your prospect is going to need to involve other stakeholders in the process. You can use this as an opportunity and basis for an upfront contract.

Example

“Thanks for evaluating the proposal. I know there are more stakeholders you need to talk to — how about we schedule a quick 5-minute check-in call to make sure everything’s on track? If we’re not, you can let me know the reasons why. If you are on board we can talk about next steps.”

This sets expectations for future interactions and will also help you address any concerns that may arise.

3. Use negative reverse selling to address potential concerns.

If you’re anticipating an obstacle, like pricing for example, you can create an upfront contract that addresses it.

Example

“Hey [prospect name]. Before I get started, here’s my biggest concern: We have competitive pricing, but we’re not the cheapest. How are you going to react at the end of this meeting (assuming all goes well) if we can’t come in at the lowest price?”

This opens the floor up for the prospect to communicate their concerns or offer reassurances and come to a mutual agreement about what will happen next in the process.

Upfront Contract Best Practices

To understand why the upfront contract is so essential, remember only one person can lead the discussion: The buyer or the seller. Obviously, you want to be the one leading the dance. The up-front contract is what allows you to do that.

To use the technique successfully, follow these three simple steps.

1. Show Appreciation and Set a Time Limit

Thank the inbound caller for his time and say how long you expect this call to take. Buyers will become irritated if they expect a five-minute discussion, only to realize it’s going to take far longer.

Have you ever gotten one of those emails asking you to do a survey that will “only take a few minutes of your time,” and then abandoned it around question #48? That’s not how you want the prospect to feel.

If this is an outreach call, tell the person how much time is needed before the first decision. If this is an inbound call, say how much time you will need to tell them about the offer.

Notice that you clarify how long the call will take before you move on to the next steps below. The goal here is simple: Make the caller feel comfortable.

You might say, “Thanks for getting on the call today, [prospect’s name]. This should take around 20 minutes.”

2. Provide an Agenda

Explain in a sentence or two what the call will go over and what your roles will be. An example might be, “We’re going to discuss your current methods for detecting spyware.”

3. Describe the Potential Outcomes

The up-front contract gives your prospect the chance to continue the sales conversation or walk away. Make sure you tell the buyer if she doesn’t like what she hears, it’s perfectly okay to tell you “no.” You’ll accept the answer and go away.

Giving your prospect the option of hanging up may be the most important part of the up-front contract. If you don’t explicitly accept this possibility, in clear, easy-to-understand terms, this strategy will not work — because the caller won’t feel in control of the call.

By giving the buyer “control” over whether or not to hang up -- which they actually already possessed — you gain their confidence, trust, and respect. You’ll also get the opportunity to define the rules that will drive the call going forward.

To illustrate, you could say, “By the end of the meeting, if you don’t feel like our services could solve your network downtime issues, I’ll hang up and won’t bother you. But if you feel like they could potentially help, are you open to scheduling another call?”

Up-Front Contract Example

Once you put it all together, here’s what an up-front contract sounds like.

1. (Appreciation and Time) [Prospect name], thanks for agreeing to meet today. Can I take three minutes …
2. (Agenda) … to give you some recommendations on [improving X] at [prospect’s company]? And then, if you have no further interest …
3. (Outcomes) ... you can hang up, but if you do have interest, let’s have another meeting.

Notice how concise this is. You do not have time for long monologues at the beginning of a sales call. Wait to hear what the inbound caller says. Once you get agreement — which you will, 95% of the time or more — you can start the conversation in earnest.

Upfront Contracts Set Everyone Up for Success

An upfront contract allows you to win half the battle within the first few seconds of the conversation. From there you can use each agreement to build upon the next — setting a path of clear expectations from start to finish.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

 

You’ve got a great idea, but need your colleagues – your boss, your teammates, your partners – to approve and help develop the implementation. You put together a great deck that makes your case professionally, rationally, and clearly. Your colleagues respond wonderfully – you get great feedback and they say they’ll begin moving the idea along. And then…. nothing. What’s going on?

BEHAVIOR VS BELIEF

What’s going on is the gap between what you mean to say and what your audience hears. Rational and significant as it may appear to you, they may not know what your ideas will mean for them or their daily functioning; they may interpret your pitch differently than you intended; they may have an entirely different set of beliefs causing their unconscious to automatically resist your ideas (regardless of their efficacy); they may not get buy-in from their own teammates to move forward. In other words, your idea may be getting lost in translation because people

• hear/translate/bias your content into their own unique understanding (which may not be in alignment with your intent);
• have unconscious beliefs that resist your material;
• may require significant buy-in from folks not yet assembled;
• may not understand why your vision is important enough to cause the disruption that could result from change.

With an existent and fully-formed hierarchy of beliefs and rules that define and operationalize it, the Other’s status quo might find the new information threatening and disruptive, causing them to resist regardless of its presentation or efficacy. It’s not until the person or team (or more accurately their internal system of values, rules, goals, behaviors) understands how to operationalize your ideas in a way that enables them to remain stable through any proposed change that they will consider shifting to anything new. The status quo has been habituated and normalized; it’s been ‘fine’, thank you. Changing it causes confusion and unknown consequences.

It’s a conundrum. They need your information, but cannot act on it until they’ve agreed to, and have a route toward, congruently changing what they’re already doing (Anything ‘new’ added to something that exists is a change management problem.). Indeed, before needing the specifics, or considering an action plan, they must first figure out how to change congruently, with minimal fallout. Your information is actually the last thing they need.

To get your great ideas appreciated and acted upon, to encourage change and buy-in in a way that supports and enhances the status quo without threatening it, you must first lead Others down their own route to congruent change in a way that incorporates and maintains their historic actions and outcomes.

Unfortunately for those of us who really have great ideas that will make a difference, no information, no outsider, can do it for them – they must do all this themselves, as none of us can never know or understand what’s going on within their idiosyncratic status quo. But we can help them figure out how to welcome, and participate in, change.

THE STEPS TO GETTING IDEAS ACCEPTED

New ideas suggest change; change suggests a threat to the daily functioning and core beliefs of the status quo, causing resistance until the status quo knows how to incorporate the new congruently. That means all of the voices and accepted norms that helped create the status quo and will be affected by the change must buy-in, lend their ideas and concerns to, and be a part of, the new solution.

Here is a way to get your ideas accepted and include all of the voices and elements necessary to promote change without resistance. Before introducing an idea, call a meeting that brings together all the folks (or their representatives) that will be affected by the change and pose the following questions [customized for your situation] one at a time, with discussion time for each. And note: make sure the initial meeting is relatively generic, focusing only on the central idea you’re proposing; during this process, your idea will expand as per the collaboration of Other’s ideas and input, including how, when, and where acceptance and adoption can occur:

A. How is our [status quo] working? Without the full range of voices heard, the full set of ideas or needs won’t be collected.

B. What do you think has stopped us from enabling it to work even more effectively? Make sure everyone has a say and there is agreement, or there might be resistance later.

C. What would it look like if we were to do whatever we’d need to do to realize more success? Get everyone’s voice involved, even if to object. Then the full view of the status quo will be represented.

D. How could we design some sort of change to ensure we don’t disrupt what’s working yet enable us to enhance the status quo for more effective results? Here, take time to get everyone into some type of agreement to fixing the same problem or expand/contract parameters.

At the first meeting, make sure everyone’s voice is heard, including other ideas, thoughts, doubts and fears. After a thorough discussion, suggest they all go away and think about it, talk to their teammates about it, and come up with additional ideas and concerns to share at a subsequent meeting. Don’t try to bias the group into your thinking – let the process evolve, with you as the Servant Leader. Using this approach, here’s what’s happens:

1. You’re inviting everyone (or group leaders at least) into a conversation to begin the discussion and change process from the standpoint of buy-in and consensus. Then everyone will own the ‘problem’ and a say in any eventual change. This collaboration ensures group engagement.

2. ‘Your’ ideas will expand to ‘our’ ideas with additional components, specific considerations and broad creativity.

3. You will have encouraged/promoted collaboration and excellence by creating an opening for change and new ideas, and enhancing your ideas even further. Will it end up looking exactly like your original idea? Nope. But it will reach a similar end goal with everyone owning the solution and contributing to its success.

4. You will highlight, discuss, and ultimately avoid resistance, as the elements of congruent change will be tackled first and any problems will be incorporated into the new solution.

Then, at the next meeting, and once there is buy-in for change, and all – all – appropriate voices have been assembled and heard from, present your ideas along with everyone else’s. Discuss collaboratively, then have the group lay out some preliminary action plans that everyone agrees to.

Net net: you’ll have amassed the full fact pattern with all voices sharing; achieve buy-in/consensus; have a larger pool of ideas to work from; design a workable plan to incorporate the new with the ‘old'; enable congruent change that fits comfortably with the status quo; and avoid resistance. You will have a harmonious team ready to work together. It may not look like you had originally envisaged, but it will reach the goals you seek with everyone’s heart and muscle behind you. And you will have become a Servant Leader to your cause.

____________

Sharon Drew Morgen is the thought leader in Change Facilitation, enabling congruent, collaborative, win-win change in several areas, including Buying Facilitation®, Learning Facilitation, Coaching Facilitation. She has written 9 books, including NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and the Amazon bestseller What? Did you really say what I think I heard? Her book Dirty Little Secrets – why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell – lays out the steps of change and influence.  Beyond information exchange and push technologies, Sharon Drew’s original skill sets impact and stimulate belief change and efficient buy-in. She has trained to over 100,000 sales folks and coaches in companies such as Boston Scientific, Bose, KPMG, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, Wachovia Bank, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, FedEx, P&G, and Morgan Stanley. She currently trains, keynotes, coaches, and supports groups seeking congruent change and win-win collaboration to enable Servant Leadership. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. See hundreds of articles on sales, change, and skills on www.sharondrewmorgen.com 

 

Selling Ideas to Colleagues is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here’s a simple truth: The world has too many mediocre salespeople, and not enough great ones. Which makes hiring the great ones really, really difficult.

Add to that the fact that sales hiring mistakes are costly: A much quoted survey of 2,700 employers showed that 41% of employers estimated the cost of a bad hire at $25k, and about 25% of employers believed the cost to be $50k or more

In short: The risk of hiring the wrong person is high, and the cost is even higher.

We’ve asked some of the most respected people in the field what the most common sales hiring mistakes are—and more importantly, how they can prevent committing them.

Want a full guide on sales hiring? Download a free copy of our Sales Hiring Playbook.

Sales hiring mistake #1:
Hiring the right people at the wrong time

A salesperson can be a great, talented, skilled and ambitious professional—but they can still be the wrong choice for your team at this time. They might have generated amazing results for another company, and yet, they might utterly fail you.

This happens especially often for early-stage companies:

A common mistake I see is not matching the salesperson to the state of the sales process. Early-stage companies often need to explore and experiment with their sales process to figure out what will work. The best practice is to find salespeople who enjoy that kind of investigative sales as the first sales hires . Often, startups may hire execution salespeople who expect the playbook [to be] already in place, particularly from other companies within the domain, who may not have the desire to tinker.

— Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Being a successful salesperson at an established company where there's already a proven sales process in place, versus being a successful salesperson at a startup operating in an environment of unknowns, requires two very different kind of people.

Past success doesn't guarantee future success. A salesperson successful selling to IT leaders at Oracle isn't likely a good fit for an early-stage startup selling to Marketing.

— Jill Rowley, Social Selling Evangelist
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Sean Sheppard has even collected data that showed there's an 80% chance of failure if you hire an experienced rep for a "first sales hire" job at a startup:

At GrowthX, we invest and grow startups and the talent that wants to work with them. So in that vein, the biggest mistake I see early stage companies make is hiring too many salespeople too soon and/or hiring salespeople who are not "Stage Relevant".

1. Too soon — until you have your customer acquisition model figured out, its unwise to hire salespeople and expect them to simply add sales. You cannot predict the future without a past!

2. Stage Relevant — conventional wisdom dictates the safe bet is to hire a salesperson with pre-existing product and market "experience." You know, someone who has sold a similar product to a similar set of customers. The problem is if they have never been the "first sales hire" then the chances you will be successful together are less than 20% ( yes, I collect the data to support this assertion). A successful first sales hire is more about the right set of attributes and behaviors and less about industry background. They need to embrace ambiguity, communicate well across teams, be a technologist with a love for product and have a passion for learning.

The number one cost in any organization is labor, and as a startup with limited resources, you only get so many firsts … so the moral of the story? Never forget your first :)

— Sean Sheppard, GrowthX
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Ask yourself: What kind of salesperson do you need right now? 

Exploration	Execution
- Wants to experiment and learn - Likes to figure things out and improvise - Good at working with budget constraints - Great at generating customer and market insights - Communicates well across teams	- Wants to execute and earn - Wants to follow and fine-tune a proven procedure - Good at efficiently utilizing existing resources - Great at consistently bringing in new customers - Focused on talking with prospects

As long as your sales process is still in the exploration mode, make sure to hire the kind of person that will thrive in that environment.

Once you're in execution mode though, look for someone who will just take your version one playbook and run with it. They'll be able to improve upon your process, increase close rates, lead velocity, and eventually help you scale the team.

Sales hiring mistake #2:
Overindexing on industry expertise

Industry experience matters, no doubt. If someone has been selling B2B SaaS solutions for years, they’ll be much more familiar with the way things work and how to talk to buyers because they’ll generally understand their wants and needs much better than someone who’s new to the industry. That being said, industry experience is often overrated at the expense of other equally relevant traits sales leaders should use to evaluate potential hires.

Too much reliance is given to industry experience and the amount of potential business the new hire says they can bring with them. Hiring managers become sold on thinking this new person will be able to get up to speed quickly. When this happens the hiring manager fails to dig deep enough into far more critical issues such as the person’s mindset, their attitude, and how they will contribute to the culture of the company.

— Mark Hunter, Keynote Speaker & Best Selling Author
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

It makes sense to look for someone with industry experience. But you don't create a winning team by simply putting together a bunch of people with industry experience. 

But there's an even worse mistake:

The biggest mistake managers make when hiring new reps is they focus too much on previous industry experience. Even worse is when they focus on the “book of business” the rep can bring with them. Instead they should be focused on work ethic, drive and coachability.

I can teach product knowledge, sales process and skills to anyone. I can’t teach drive and the willingness to get better every day. If you’re a lazy manager looking for a quick hit then go ahead and hire the industry rep with an existing book of business. If you’re a manager that cares, hire a kid with drive and coach them to be great.

— John Barrows, Sales trainer to the world's fastest growing companies
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Always remember this: You're hiring a person. You're not buying their existing network. 

Sales hiring mistake #3:
Not learning enough about the candidate from people other than the candidate

Doing your due diligence when hiring someone for your company is always important. But it’s particularly important if you’re dealing with salespeople: There are plenty of salespeople who are really good at selling themselves.

Not checking references. And by references, I’m not talking about the people the candidate lists on their resume. Go on LinkedIn and find the common connections. Call them up unprompted. These people will be less concerned with the HR compliance B.S. They will shoot you straight. You will learn more from one 15 minute reference call than spending 2 days with the candidate. After all, they are salespeople. They interview well and know how to play a role. The key is knowing how they will act when no one is looking.

— Steve Richard, Chief Revenue Officer
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

One of the main reasons why you want to do background checks is not just to check how skilled they are, but what kind of attitude they bring to the table.

Everybody can start out full of enthusiasm and determination. But how is this person going to perform six months or years into the job? Are they still going to be as motivated and coachable as they've been during the interview process? 

The biggest hiring mistake I see committed is to hire people solely based on skills. Granted, sales skills and past track records are important, but if someone has a bad attitude or isn’t coachable, they may end up being more of a challenge than the hiring party expected. This is where the hiring practice of checking references comes into play. If the new potential hire was doing so well at their last company, why did they leave? The answer to this question may tell you whether or not this person is flexible or coachable—willing to fit into your company’s required standards of performance.

— Tom Hopkins, Founder & Chairman
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Reference checks can give you insight into what it's actually like working with this person (versus the story they tell you). Ask questions like:

• Was the candidate accountable in performing tasks?
• What was it like to work with the candidate?
• Did s/he get along well with management and co-workers?
• How did he/she handle conflict/pressure/criticism?
  
• When they learned they made a mistake, what did they do? 
• What was this person searching for in their previous job?

Ideally get references from both people who managed them, co-workers, and people whom they managed (if that applies).

Check a candidate’s references BEFORE you make the decision to hire.

Hiring managers usually call a candidate's reference AFTER they have already made the decision to hire the person. At which point in time the manager has already fallen in love with the candidate and is not really interested in learning any information that will cause him or her to rethink their decision.

That is completely backwards. Reference calls are not meant to be a validation of your hiring decision. They are an essential step in the process of qualifying your candidates.

Too often hiring managers defer making reference calls until after they make their hiring decision because they treat them as a pro forma CYA step they need to take. They are too trusting of their gut instinct instead of gathering more data to help make a fully informed decision.

Two quick rules of thumb for reference checks: 1) Invest no more than a phone screen and one interview with a candidate before doing reference checks. 2) Conduct your reference checks before you decide to bring a candidate in to spend the day interviewing with multiple people on your team.

Why risk wasting everyone’s time if the candidate isn’t fully qualified?

— Andy Paul
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

As a sales manager, it’s temping to treat a reference check as a formality in the hiring process. If you’re excited about a candidate, you want to move ahead fast.

Don’t delegate the reference check to someone else. If you’re the person responsible for making this hire, you need to do the reference checks yourself.

When talking with references, don’t just pay attention to what they say about the potential hire—pay just as much attention to what they don’t say. Most people don’t want to say negative things about a former employee or co-worker.

Make sure you speak with someone who knows the potential hire really well.

Ideally, speak with three different kinds of people: Those who worked above, with, and beyond them.

Explain to the reference what the job is you’re hiring for, and what will be expected of them—and ask them if the potential hire will be able to fulfill these expectations well. They might have been performing great at their last job, but even if the role you’re hiring for is the same, there will probably be differences in how this role will succeed in your organization versus another organization.

Ask very specific questions:

• Bad questioning: Talk about expectations for this job, then ask “Do you think Sam will be a good fit for this role?”
• Good questioning: Talk about expectations for this job, then ask “Where do you think Sam will excel, and where will he struggle?”
  
  

Sales hiring mistake #4:
Hiring ducks and expecting them to become eagles

Sometimes you’ll come across a salesperson who you’ll be able to elevate to a completely new level of success in their life. All they’ve needed was a fair opportunity and a bit of coaching—and boom, you’ve got a rockstar.

But most of the time, that’s not how it works. If someone doesn’t have a track record of success, chances are that success will remain elusive for them.

That does not mean they need to have a successful sales career already. It just means you should be able to see indicators of excellence in their past. Have they done—or at least attempted—anything remarkable? Do you see anything in their past that demonstrates they possess the qualities you’re looking to hire for? If not, that’s a signal you should pay attention to and ask yourself (and the candidate) why you should believe they are actually a good fit.

They hire ordinary people and hope to train or motivate them to become extraordinary.

If you want sales success from an adult, you will be able to see patterns of sales skill and drive in the person’s life. Use assessments and interviews that reveal ambition, discipline, eagerness to learn, humility, willingness to change in order to succeed, and a desire to make a difference for others. Find one person like that and they will outproduce five others who are not like that.

— Jim Cathcart
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

You don’t want to be the kind of person who’s looking to hire someone under the age of 30 with 20 years of industry experience—but do look for proof that this person has been pursuing excellence in the past.

Sales hiring mistake #5:
Hiring based on gut feeling

It’s not just sales leaders that are guilty of this mistake. Hiring based on gut feeling is "the most common way hiring happens in the world and it doesn't work, it leads to about a 50% hiring failure rate—that's based on about half a century worth of data on it.” Here’s some advice on what to do instead:

Sales leaders should NOT hire by "gut" but instead use data based on their top 3 most successful reps versus their bottom 3 least successful reps. Don't fall in love with a candidate because they have industry experience—the will to sell and how coachable they are would be much more important for success.

— Lori Richardson
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Make a list of interview questions that make it easy to evaluate candidates on different criteria:

A common sales hiring mistake is going with the gut. No matter how good your instincts [are], proven hiring practices work better to identify sales talent and fit. I work with sales organizations to select the sales competencies that produce top results. Once we know those competencies, we can develop behavioral interviewing questions that accurately pinpoint which candidates are the best match . Not using a process like this makes sales hiring an unnecessary gamble.

— Deb Calvert
LinkedIn | Twitter |  Website

Even if you have a good "people sense" and are typically on point—balance it out with data.

Building systems and processes is not fun—but it decreases failure rates and increases efficiencies in the long run.

Way too many sales managers rely on gut-feel when they're hiring. I respect intuition and don't think we should ignore it. But if that is your primary hiring strategy for sales, you're asking for slower ramp-up times, higher-failure rates, and sales turnover, with all the associated time drains and costs.

Instead, organizations should take a scientific, systems approach to sales selection. They should:

• Determine the required sales competencies by role
• Determine the characteristics and traits necessary for success in each role
• Create job documentation based on the competencies and traits
• Select and tailor a validated psychometrics assessment
• Implement behavioral interviewing
• Test candidates' judgment in hypothetical situations
• Orchestrate skill validations and simulations
• Perform background and reference checks

I've seen this systems approach to sales selection produce radically better hiring results, including, in one case, reducing first-year new-hire turnover rates from 75% to 25%.

— Mike Kunkle, Sales Consultant
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

There’s no simple way to answer this question—you surely should not ignore your gut feeling. Especially when your mind and your gut are at odds with each other. But don’t be like 90 percent of small business owners who hire based on gut feeling.

Sales hiring mistake #6:
Setting the wrong hiring criteria

If you’re among the minority of sales leaders who set hiring criteria and actually writes them down, congratulations. If not, do this right now: Take three minutes to make a list of your hiring criteria. Don’t worry about getting it wrong—this is a version one you’ll revise later. Here’s some great advice on how to identify the right hiring criteria:

It's not being accurate or realistic with their hiring criteria. Too many companies use bullshit hiring criteria like SaaS experience or number of years of sales experience, size of rolodex, or industry experience etc. These hiring criteria have very little bearing [on] whether or not someone can actually do the job. Companies need to ask the people in the actual position to create the hiring criteria , because they know exactly what skills they leverage to be successful and what it takes. Then look for those skills.

Organizations, hiring managers need to take an audit of the actual skills and capabilities the job requires to be kickass at it and then hire for those traits.

Be very, very specific. Number of years of experience, industry knowledge, a rolodex and more aren't skills. Hire the skills!!!

— //keenan
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

It can seem daunting to clearly define your specific hiring criteria, but the key is to not strive for perfection. The key is to have a workable document now that you can put to use and then improve over time. That’s how you build an effective and reliable hiring process for a growing sales organization.

Not sure how to get started? Do this:

1. Write down a list of hiring criteria (take 3 minutes to do this)
2. Ask the people in the actual position to write down hiring criteria
3. Together with your team, review and prioritize the criteria
4. Also ask: Are there any disqualifying criteria specifically for this role?
5. Implement these criteria into your interviewing process
6. Occasionally, you’ll encounter candidates who do fulfill all your criteria, but whom you don’t want to hire (as well as candidates who do not fulfill all your main criteria but you do want to hire). Immediately note when this is the case and see if you should adjust your criteria.
7. Revise your criteria periodically—they’re not set in stone, and the more you use these criteria to guide your hiring process, the more they’ll change and evolve.

Sales hiring mistake #7:
Taking the candidates' word for granted

People will use all kinds of attributes to describe themself favorably when they’re interviewing for a job. Especially salespeople, who tend to be more optimistic. They’re all resourceful, creative, relentless, reliable, detail-oriented, big picture thinking, consistent … and they might actually believe that’s all true. But it’s your job to separate fact from fiction.

The way to increase the likelihood of making wise hiring decisions is to first understand what you are looking for when hiring a salesperson. What qualities does a good hire for the open sales position have? Thinking this though and documenting it, prior to interviewing, is essential. Then craft some questions that guide candidates in demonstrating what you are looking for. The key is asking them to demonstrate, not state that they are skilled in the desired behavior or have the character qualities. Rest assured, if someone cannot demonstrate skill in a behavior or times when they have exhibited a character quality, then most likely they don’t have it.

— David Hoffeld
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

So in addition to setting the right hiring criteria, you also want candidates to demonstrate that they match the criteria.

Sales hiring mistake #8:
Hiring for culture fit

You want a tight-knit sales team that creates wins for the organization, but that doesn’t mean you want all your reps to think alike, act alike, and look alike. It’s natural to want to hire for culture fit, but it can also be a very limiting factor for the growth of an organization. Facebook has famously prohibited the use of “culture fit” when it comes to evaluating candidates.

A common sales hiring mistake is managers having too strict of a candidate profile. It's good to have "a type" or know what works best for your team, but don't let that stop you from building a diverse sales team. Diversity is important for many reasons, but if talking strictly for sales purposes, it will allow your team to understand and appeal to different types of prospects from cultural, industrial, and many other important angles . It will help the overall sales process, messaging, and team grow more than it ever could by just hiring the same exact person over and over.

— Max Altschuler
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

But as much as looking for culture fit is only natural, it’s also natural to be put off by people who don’t seem to be a good culture fit. How do you handle that? Victor Antonio has some great advice for this situation:

Too often we hire people who are like us and whom we see as a great fit for our company. The upside is a stable culture; the downside is a lack of diversity when it comes to thinking. Hiring people based on 'they seem like a fit' is valid, but it may also blind us to new ideas and ways of doing things. Solution? Know that you have a personal bias towards hiring people like you and be 'mindful' of this when interviewing a candidate. If the person comes off a bit abrasive, instead of dismissing them as not a fit, ask more probing questions as to what they would do differently in your company? Where do they think they can contribute? By focusing on contribution of ideas and less on personality, we can avoid any type of confirmation bias when making a hiring decision.

— Victor Antonio
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

You want a diverse sales team in every sense of the word. At Close.io, we often have our German speaking reps talk with our German prospects—and it makes a difference. In most cases, these prospects are perfectly fluent in English and use it every day at work, but because the sales rep speaks German with them, it’s easier to connect, and close deals.

Sales hiring mistake #9:
Hiring just one rep (because you don't need more or can't afford to hire more)

Too often startups decide to “just hire a salesperson.” They want to save money, they just want to “try having a salesperson”, and they don’t want to overcomplicate things. All of this is understandable—and wrong.

Whenever possible, hire in twos or threes. In fact, strive to do so even when it's not possible.

Especially, if hiring for a new role. It's too, too hard, when you don't have known success metrics in place, to know whether you have a people problem or process problem. When you hire in groups:

A) They typically help each other out
B) It creates some healthy competition
C) It cuts down on training costs and time

— David Greenberger
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

In addition to what David has outlined here, hiring in pairs allows you to create learnings that aren't tied to just one person. Say you hire one salesperson and develop a process and it works: Does it work because of the process, or because of the person? You can't really know.

With two reps, you'll be able to create the organizational learnings that'll help you grow later on. And if one person takes off (remember, sales is a field with high turnover), you don't have to start from zero.

Sales hiring mistake #10:
Hiring great people and letting them down in the onboarding phase

There are two common ways sales leaders screw up the onboarding process: They either bury a new rep in paperwork and excessive training for weeks, without letting them actually do any sales—or they just push them into the deep end of the pool, having them “shadow a few senior reps and then start dialing.”

Hiring is just the beginning. So often, the mistake people make is not considering how they will onboard the salesperson so they can ramp to full productivity quickly. Typical ramp up is 6-9 months. That’s too long. There are many onboarding solutions that make it inexcusable to make this kind of mistake.

— Nancy Nardin
LinkedIn | Twitter | WebsiteTools

To accelerate the onboarding time, check out our 1-day hack and our 4-week onboarding schedule.

Sales hiring mistake #11:
Hiring job hoppers

Sales is a tough field to be in. An endless barrage of rejection comes with the job, and most people aren’t willing or able to expose themselves to the ups and downs that come with the job. So you want people who can dedicate themselves long-term to this.

There's a lot of talk about why hiring job hoppers may be the best option nowadays.

A common mistake I see sales managers make in recent years? They hire job hoppers! Apply common sense and just look around. Study your colleagues and peers who are successful and wealthy. Are they job hoppers? In looking at the clients I work with, the resounding answer is no.

Look outside your sphere of influence. Would Mark Zuckerberg be the successful entrepreneur he is today if he decided to job hop two years after starting Facebook? How about great athletes? Do they switch from football to basketball to track and field because they feel a calling to a new career? Just don’t settle for a job hopper!

— Colleen Stanley
LinkedIn | Twitter |  Website

If someone has been constantly switching jobs, why do you think they’ll stick around longer with you? Even if they can perform, is it worthwhile to onboard, train and manage them only to have to look for a replacement six months later?

Now you don't have to take as definite a position on this as Mark Suster, whose advice is to "never hire job hoppers. Never." 

If you've got a candidate in front of you who looks like a dream candidate, but they've got a job hopper resume, ask them:

1. Why did you leave your previous position?
2. Why did you take the next one?

But you better have a damn good reason if you do hire a job hopper.

Sales hiring mistake #12:
Hiring people who are no better at sales than you are

As a sales leader, your job is not to be the best. Your job is to get the best people on board, give them what they need to succeed, and get out of their way.

Feeling threatened by an interviewee who apparently has more experience/qualifications/successful track record than the manager conducting the interview.

Advice: Always hire the very best candidate(s) you can because their success will reflect back on you.

— Jonathan Farrington
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Changing from sales rep to sales manager requires a change in mindset. As a sales rep, you want to be the best. As a manager, your job is to find people who are better than you. It's not easy to make that switch. But nobody said being a sales leader is easy. You want to put great people in a position to win, and do everything in your power to help them succeed.

Sales hiring mistake #13:
Hiring too quickly

Oftentimes when hiring sales reps, you hire because you want sales NOW. But rushing into hiring a sales rep will often end up wasting both time and money.

The biggest sales hiring mistake I see business owners make is to ask their friends if they know someone in sales that they’d recommend, then interviewing only that person. Business owners owe it to themselves, their employees and their company’s welfare to interview at least 5 candidates for a sales position rather than that the first person that excites them .

— Kendra Lee
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

This isn't just true for small business owners. Plenty of startups, fueled by fresh rounds of financing, get into a hiring frenzy. Not to name any names, but ... well, let's just call them out: It's 2015 and Zenefits is being celebrated as "the fastest growing company in the world", preaching the gospel of hypergrowth, and sharing how they scaled inside sales:

About six months later, things looked differently:

Fast-forward another year, and this is where we're at:

That didn't work out so well.

The biggest mistake managers make in the hiring process is they rely only on the subjective (resume/interview) and not objective (assessments and benchmarks). To recruit better, first benchmark the accountabilities of what is necessary to succeed in the job. Then assess the candidate against the benchmark. Use the gaps identified to craft questions to see if this is really the right person for the job.

Second biggest mistake manager’s make is they hire the first best looking candidate. They are in such a rush to make the hire they are blind to the red flags. You should only hire someone when they are compared to at least 2 or 3 equally qualified candidates to make sure you are making the right decision.

Third and final mistake manager’s make, they have no formal hiring process. Process should include a phone interview. If they can’t pass that, why invite them in? Then a first interview with you and other managers if appropriate. Bring back qualified candidates to a second interview (people sometimes change when they come back, [they're] more relaxed in the second setting). Have the final round candidates take an assessment and compare [them] to your benchmark to prepare for the final interview. You may also want to take the candidates out to a meal to see how they act when their guard is down. After all the final interviews are complete, make your best decision.

Sometimes the best decision is not to hire anyone if there is no qualified candidate and to start all over. A bad hire can cripple your company.

Remember this mantra—Hire slow and fire fast!

For more information how to lead, coach and hire effectively, check out the online video series Leading with IMPACT.

— Ron Karr
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

It's better to hire slow and fire fast, than the other way around.

Companies get desperate. They hire too quickly and from the wrong talent pool. They throw an ad online, screen resumes, conduct a screening interview, hold one sales interview and then pick the best of the worst.

What should they do? First, hire a professional recruiter. Short of that, read You’re Not the Person I Hired and Hire Right, Higher Profits and follow my steps.

Here are the steps to build a hiring process that attracts great salespeople:

1. Write a job description and success factors (you’ll know what these are if you read the books I recommend)
2. Write a dynamite job ad to attract the right candidates (same as above, read)
3. Recruit! The best candidates are not looking for a job. Your job ad might attract someone great, but likely you will find them by recruiting or a referral. A Players will usually recommend A Players so ask your A Players to help recruit.
4. Screen carefully before you start the interviews. People lie on resumes. Check social media. Also, remember that most people are not taught how to put together a good resume, so if they come recommended and their resume is not great, put them through the process anyway.
5. Prepare for the interviews. Always have an observer. They are listening and watching for things the interviewer will miss. Things like attitude, body language, smiling, fidgeting, voice qualities.
6. Prepare questions for all the interviews. Some like behavioral questions and some like top grading. I like a combination.
7. Before you start interviews, be sure you have at least 5 candidates so you can compare.
8. Do a phone interview. Listen for enthusiasm, voice quality, ability to annunciate, ability to engage the listener, etc. as well as if their answers make sense.
9. Do a video interview. If they can’t figure out the software, that tells you something. Ask some of the same questions and ask them to present something.
10. Sell the candidate on the job, the company and the culture. Your process will be more vigorous than any they have gone through, so they have to be convinced it is worth their time.
11. Remind the candidate that they are interviewing your company as well to be sure it is a good fit for them.
12. Give them an assignment or two. Make sure they can write.
13. Do in person interviews. Involve different teams. Don’t overwhelm the candidate with too many people in the room. 2 or 3 at a time is good.
14. Have the candidate do a presentation, live or online. Ask them to sell you their current product if they have been selling previously.
15. Have the candidate shadow and/or talk to others who do the job to get impressions from both sides.
16. Test their skills. Make them prove they can use the tools or learn the tools your company uses. You may want to give them other types of assessments if you have benchmarks. Certain profile assessments can help you choose and help you do a better job with each individual when onboarding and coaching. Note: Some profiles are not for use for hiring. Check with an HR professional.
17. Score all the candidates. Discuss, debate. Keep in mind cultural fit as well as experience, knowledge, skill, network.
18. Choose the best of the best. But don’t worry if your 1st choice doesn’t accept, you will have several other top choices if you use this method.
19. Make an offer.
20. Have a fabulous welcome and onboarding program.

— Alice Heiman
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Not rushing into hiring decisions also means that you need to look ahead far enough, and not wait for an urgent need to develop that puts you in a desparate position: 

Hiring the right talent has a large impact on your ability to make your number. The key is to look forward to the strategy of tomorrow. As your strategy continues to evolve, your hiring practices need to keep pace. You’ll have to predict who you’ll need for the future.

What is the best way to do this? You can start by avoiding these 3 common mistakes.

#1 – Only hiring from your industry

Often, many companies tend to hire from their industry only. The problem with this? As emerging best practices continue to advance, yesterday’s successful talent could now be obsolete. What do top companies do instead? They draft the “best athletes”, not just those who know the offense and playbook. Those things can be taught. It may take longer to ramp up their industry knowledge. But the upside potential is much greater, making the tradeoff worth it. Ultimately you should hire for competency over experience.

#2 – Only considering the role you’re hiring for

Yes, you need to understand the role you’re filling. That is definitely important. But it’s not the only piece to the puzzle. You have to make sure the person you hire can work across all functions. Think about the other departments they will be working with. For example, will they work well with the marketing team? Because if not, it can cause a lot of pain. It can cause distrust between departments. And it can cause wasted time and energy on “fixing” the issues. When hiring, be sure they will be able to work well across the organization.

#3 – Being reactive when hiring talent

Being reactive when it comes to talent causes a lot of issues. It leads to hasty searches, and oftentimes hiring the wrong person. The impact of these mistakes can be felt for years. The average cost of a mis-hire is 5-7 times the first year cost. And that’s just the hard cost. The ongoing impact can linger for years. Instead you should be proactively sourcing capable talent. Find folks that can fill current and future corporate, product, marketing and sales positions. You need a constant supply of top new talent for your team.

Organizations can only succeed in the marketplace if they place the right talent in the right performance conditions. What steps should you take to do this successfully?

The first step involves understanding the other functional strategies. Are they clear? After reviewing, do you understand exactly what talent you need? Once armed with that knowledge, the next step is profiles. This means understanding what good looks like. Following profiles, you must next focus on assessments. This involves determining whether you have the right people. Are you letting the right folks into the organization? The next piece is sourcing. As we mentioned earlier, you need to understand where to find the best talent for your organization. And then comes the hiring process. This doesn’t just mean screening interviews and going with your gut. Instead consider a job tryout before hiring.

If you’ve followed the steps above you, you should now have the right talent in place. But it doesn’t end there. Once you’ve selected a new hire, you have to consider onboarding. And this is more than just some introductory videos and classes. It’s about shortening the road to productivity. You must teach the skills and behaviors needed to perform the job. Then, to guarantee continued success, you must have both talent development and succession plans in place. This allows you to continue to grow and develop your team successfully.

— Daniel Perry,  Principal at  SBI , Sales Benchmark Index
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Resist the temptation to grow at any price. Building a sustainable business takes more than throwing salespeople at the problem.

Wrapping it up

The best way to build a high-performing sales team is to hire the right people in the first place. All the managing, training, coaching and optimization you can add to that is great.

But invest the best training and resources in the wrong people, and it's all a waste.

Hiring great talent is a tough job in any field—it's particularly hard when you're in charge of a team that's needs to hit a certain revenue number fast. And while it's easy to just hire fast, there are few areas of your business the cost of making bad decisions are as high as in hiring.

So avoid these mistakes and use our (free) Sales Hiring Playbook, which has practical step-by-step guides and checklists to help you get the right people on board to take your sales organization to the next level.

It’s become trite to say “sales has changed more in the past 5 years than in all preceding history.” Indulge me with leveraging this trite phrase. Usually, I look at these issues from the customer point of view, knowing that much of what has changed about sales has been a result of the changing buyers. Permit me to look internally only, let’s look within our own organizations and within our profession.

Let’s look at some of the things that have happened:

Content is king: Billions are invested in content development–much focused directly on customers, creating awareness, driving interest, creating demand, hopefully driving leads.

Beyond just content, marketing invests billions in other areas, all focused on helping create more customers and supporting sales through the entire buying cycle.

In the past 5 years, thousands of sales and marketing automation tools have hit the market, with thousands more every year. All these tools are intended to “help” sales people become more efficient, more productive, more knowledgeable, better prepared, more impactful.

Training has skyrocketed. Training in all forms, workshops, seminars, eLearning, webcasts, podcasts. It’s available where ever we turn. Where affordability might have been a barrier in the past, much is free or near free.

Information and data available to sales people keeps growing. We can research each company, each individual understanding them in ways we have never been able to do in the past. We can “stalk” them through the digital world, develop relationships with them. We have analytic tools giving us insights on buying behaviors, propensity to buy, and all sorts of things–all focused on helping us talk to the right customer, at the right time, about the things most relevant to them.

We have new business models in sales, rather than having to be masters of everything, specialization reigns. There are prospectors, qualifiers, demoers, account managers, closers, product line specialist, value engineering specialists, support teams and resources—and of course all the tools and technologies enabling us to collaborate and communicate with everyone.

And then there are the thousands of blogs, articles, books, videos, podcasts all helping us be better, more productive and more efficient. You can attend conferences focused on every aspect of marketing and selling every week.

Yet, virtually every study shows sales performance flat to declining. The number of people making goal is horrible. While I haven’t seen research data, in our own consulting practice, we see skyrocketing CPOD (or the equivalent), declining overall productivity.

Time available for selling, voluntary attrition, employee satisfaction, absenteeism, and other indicators — all going in the wrong direction.

We see more data and articles focused on things like seller distraction (from all this help we are giving), cognitive overload (it’s a brain thing—Google it).

Somehow in a world of abundance of tools, information, training, content, data we are accomplishing less.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink things. Perhaps rather than more, we should be simplifying, focusing on the few things that are most critical, excelling in executing those.

Perhaps we should think of how we might to more with less, rather than the inverse.

4 Lead Generation Tools You Can Use to Increase Sales

Today I have some lead generation resources that can truly increase your business sales.

Attracting new clients can be a long and drawn out process. Your business needs the best resources available that can both save you time and expense. Do you need to improve your online sales? Take advantage of these great tools, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Seamlessly schedule meetings – Calendly

You’ve taken the time to make a new connection with an important prospect, but find it difficult to communicate with back and forth emails. Calendly is a great tool that allows you to create simple rules that coordinates your availability. Share links via your email or on your website so that your meetings can be simple to set up by the other party. Integrate your calendars from Google, Outlook, Office 365 or iCloud with greater flexibility and control.

2) Effective sales engagement – SalesLoft

Convert more targeted accounts into paying clients. SalesLoft combines your efforts on email, social media, telephone sales, and analytics. Deliver more personalized messages through a multitude of channels while aligning your marketing strategy with your sales. This tool is an all-in-one resource for executives and sales representatives who need a more comprehensive way to reach their potential customers.

3) Find the right prospects – Unomy

Sell smarter while finding the best leads for your business. Unomy provides hyper targeted lists in seconds from their large database. This will enable you to discover new opportunities across different industries with precise, real-time data. Both marketing and sales teams can benefit from this intelligent resource.

4) Convert more leads – LeadSquared

Would you like to attract new prospects through smart automation? LeadSquared brings more action to your sales funnel with attractive email campaigns and responsive landing pages that convert well. Stop losing valuable leads with this great tool, and attract more qualified ones who will be more likely to buy.

Hopefully you will find these lead generation tools helpful for your business sales. Are there any that you would like to add as well?