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Managing and maintaining a B2B (business-to-business) customer support operation isn’t easy. With customer expectations being higher than ever before and the business world being more complex, it’s not uncommon to receive pressure both internally and externally to provide great customer support. So how can you manage this pressure? The secret is being organized and efficient by making sure the right things get done in the right order. Here are some key steps to effectively prioritize your customer support needs so your operation thrives as the industry evolves.

Step 1 – Implement customer support technology – Simply put, modernizing your customer support operation is a great place to start when it comes to prioritizing your needs. Not only is customer support technology (such as software) the backbone of a support information infrastructure, it also provides your team with a central place to work and solve problems together. Don’t forget to select technology that is able to scale upward as your support operation grows.

Step 2 – Customize and train employees on technology – Too often companies think simply purchasing a new technology will magically result in them providing great customer support. This just isn’t true. It’s important after implementing a technology to optimize it by changing the settings, adding elements of your brand, and utilizing automation as much as possible. Once the technology is configured and in place, take the time to train support agents on how to use it in the most efficient way.

Step 3 – Utilize the technology and encourage innovation – Once agents are trained and feel comfortable with the technology, don’t make them follow a script with their responses. The B2B industry is always changing, so empower your agents to innovate to resolve customer issues better than before. With the help of technology you can also move from being reactive with your support and start being proactive. For example, you can see how many customers are using an old version of your software and encourage them to upgrade to prevent future issues with outdated versions.

Step 4 – Use data to improve customer support – Once you have your support technology up and running with your agents utilizing it effectively, it’s time to dig deeper into optimizing your support operation with data and reporting. Look at key metrics such as ticket types and ticket volumes to determine what solutions should be deployed in the future to increase your level of efficiency. A popular next step is implementing an online self-service solution so your customers can solve simple and common requests on their own time. Self-service is also a great agent asset and when linked with technology it puts content directly at the fingertips of agents so they can resolve customer issues faster.

Step 5 – Enable other departments by adding users and integrations – Prove that customer support isn’t just a cost center. Now that everything is running smoothly and your optimizations are in place, add employees from different departments such as sales and operations. Break down silos and let them see exactly how current customers are interacting with you on a daily basis so they can plan their own strategies more efficiently. For example, a salesperson may check to see the overall satisfaction and number of tickets a current customer has before they attempt an upsell. Integrations with different technology are also important to increase the usage of customer support information and to save time instead of toggling between technology systems. It’s easier than ever to get systems working together and there are numerous integration tools available to assist companies that want to communicate more efficiently.

To summarize, prioritizing your B2B customer support needs starts with a focus on detailed planning and choosing the right technology. From here, training and evolution with this technology is crucial to make the most of your investment. As time goes on, leverage the data you’ve acquired to make improvements to your support operation and share the technology and information with other departments as well. These insights will strengthen communication with both your peers and your customers. It can be easy to want to put the “cart before the horse” sometimes in the business world, but making sure you have your customer support priorities in order will create a successful support operation.

Social business intelligence is a new age technology that allows data sharing in a systematic and efficient manner. Some of the social business intelligence tools are specifically designed to analyse, assess and create business reports on the basis of real-time end use cloud computing data. Such business reports help companies in understanding customer behaviour and expectations. In general, using social business intelligence, product managers can typically obtain a calculated market data through various social media analytics. Per the latest data released by Future Market Insights (FMI), the global market for social business intelligence is expected to reach a valuation of around US$ 29 Billion over 2026.

Modern businesses are rapidly adopting latest analytical data generation technologies and management systems to stay at par in the market. Which is why the application of social business analysis tools is likely to increase in the near future. Meanwhile, the robust popularity of social media worldwide is necessitating more efficient business management systems capable of handling big data. At present, a majority of enterprises require big data management solutions to store and archive bulks of unsegregated data. Therefore, developers are actively focusing on introducing systems that are capable of managing big data and massive amounts of unstructured data generated from social media, enterprise IT systems and CRM conversations. Further, such big data management systems help users to store, analyse and efficiently manage data coming from multiple sources. In 2014, oracle introduced a business intelligence cloud service that can assists organisations in making speedy and more calculative decisions by lowering barriers. Moreover, such solutions are cost-effective, user-friendly and enable comprehensive information access.

On the flipside, security remains a major concern for developers. Susceptibility to cyber threats is limiting the use of social business intelligence solution and services. Increasing occurrence of cyber hacks and illegal security impeachments continue to deter the overall growth of the social business intelligence market. Nevertheless, arrival advanced cloud-based social business analytic tools is facilitating enterprises in shifting their workloads from on-premise to cloud systems.

In the forthcoming years, analytic frameworks such as the MapReduce is anticipated to turn open-source software framework systems into general-purpose data management systems. These systems are already being used in the processing of big data and distributed storage. For instance, Hadoop a popular open-source software framework systems have the capabilities of handling various types of workloads including graph and numeric data structure. It is likely that increasing adoption of such open-source software framework systems will benefit the social business intelligence market in the long run.

FMI’s report on the global social business intelligence reveals that the BSFI sector will have extensive applications of business intelligence tools over the next couple of years. Meanwhile, the IT and telecommunication sector is expected to account for around US$ 3 Billion of the overall market value in 2017. Amongst regions, North America will remain as a key market for social business intelligence. Growing popularity of wearable devices that allow monitoring of various bodily data and assist people in marinating healthier lifestyle in the US and Canada is projected to further expand the application base of social business intelligence services in the region.

Immigrant pathways to innovation are neither obvious nor automatic. The same homeostatic mechanisms that keep up a nation or company’s culture, values, beliefs, assumptions, and traditions often limit the successful introduction of new ideas, ways of doing, and routes of inquiry. Diversity initiatives that seek to incorporate difference and celebrate uniqueness often struggle with the same challenges; to incorporate ideas or values that are different from those already invested requires the reconsideration of paradigms, models, and rules of order.

Creative thinking shares characteristics with modern-day immigrant pathways to innovation to include:

1. Ability to reject conceptual limits in the pursuit of knowledge, ideas, and understanding
2. Ability to establish connections between constructs and nodes, previously considered incompatible or contradictory
3. Ability to conceptualize new functionality, purposes, and abilities; and
4. Ability to reconfigure information nodes, generate new models, and propose new realities

Immigrant pathways share other characteristics with creative types in that their incorporation and processing of information has an increasing ability to:

• Pierce the veil of explanation and rationale
• Perceive ‘what is’ versus ‘what is desired’
• Identify potential gaps between ‘what is intended’ and ‘what is achieved’

Consider the self-image of a nation when contrasted to the experience of someone who recently immigrated. Or consider the experience of a citizen who is well served by the status quo when contrasted with the experience of a citizen who is left at a disadvantage. National trends to recruit those with specific local or agency ‘experience’ is more likely to produce homogeneity and limit the business opportunities cultivated when a more complex understanding of what is possible is available. Similar limits surface when specific technologies or practices are emphasized, and others are ignored.

When implied homogeneity of thought, action, behavior, and beliefs is celebrated in policy, recruitment initiatives, and through cultural reinforcement mechanisms the opportunity for due diligence, realization of effective analysis, and leveraging of available immigrant innovation pathways decreases. Celebrating diversity of thought, behavior, and experience within a containment field that limits its influence is to miss opportunities to solve complex problems, identify and overcome invisible barriers, and increase value.

Innovation competencies in each industry and market require further exploration in order to identify what core skills are actually needed to support a vibrant, creative, and effective workplace. Characteristics that fall into the ‘nice to have’ comfort zone can continue to remain emphasized but should not overshadow future (and often unmapped) industry or customer requirements. Many business and economic models may support the so-called ‘self regulating’ systems and markets, but the question is whether all the voices demanding innovation are being heard. If the voices remain homogeneous, opportunities for innovation, learning, and increased value may be lost.

How is your team leveraging innovation pathways to innovation? Increasing agility of thought and ability to explore new possibilities? Measuring innovation? Share your comments below.

Resources:

Thomas-Breitfeld, S. (2017, April 11). How to Think Differently about Diversity in Nonprofit Leadership: Get Comfortable with Discomfort. Retrieved April 12, 2017, from https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2017/04/10/think-differently-diversity-nonprofit-leadership-get-comfortable-discomfort/

A Note From Alice: Building a sales team that delivers revenue and is a joy to work with starts by making the right hires. For sales leaders and business owners, putting this type of team together means attracting talented, smart, go-getting people. LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool to reach the candidates you want—if you design your profile to attract them. Below, my friend, Larry Levine (a top social sales strategist and sales coach) shares two ways you can use your LinkedIn profile to attract top salespeople.

Writing this blog about how to use your LinkedIn profile to attract new customers got me thinking about ways sales leaders and business owners can attract high-quality sales professionals through LinkedIn.

Social media matters when you’re recruiting and hiring sales reps. When a socially savvy sales leader or business owner wants to hire a salesperson, they’ll check the candidate’s social media channels to monitor activity. The quality of the content the candidate posts and the frequency of how often that person engages may have some influence on the hiring process.

If you’re looking at a candidate’s social profile, what do you think that sales candidate is doing to you? Don’t you think he or she is looking at your website, your social channels and your LinkedIn profile? What opinions are they forming about what you can offer them?

When positioned correctly, your LinkedIn profile can attract the right job candidates to your company. To make it appealing and inviting, make sure your headline and summary provide information and details that would make someone want to work for you.

What Does Your Headline Tell Me?

Write a professional headline. This is your moment to grab the attention of the ideal candidate. Most people are not aware that your professional headline follows you wherever you go on LinkedIn in every post, every comment, group discussion and published article. What would entice someone to want to know more about your company? A professional headline of “Sales Manager at XYZ Company” or “Providing Sales Professionals Growth Opportunities by Fostering a Culture of Leadership, Coaching, and Collaboration”?

Attracting or Repelling?

Design your summary to attract great salespeople. I love this summary section! It is the most powerful part of your LinkedIn profile. In 2,000 characters, you can tell sales candidates how you can help them get to the next level in their careers, who you are, and what motivates you. Use this section to tell interested potential sales reps about how you can help them. Appeal to their emotions and position yourself as a relationship builder. Some key points to highlight include:

• A clear vision and great team
• Access to resources
• Clear expectations
• Company culture fostering growth opportunities
• Company growth potential

Think about the summary section from the perspective of the sales candidate. Ask yourself what would entice them to come work for your business. Try to answer questions such as:

• What kind of environment do I provide to my sales team?
• What do I love most about what I do?
• How do our clients describe the work of my sales team and their support?
• What do I want to be professionally known for?

By tweaking these two areas of your LinkedIn profile, you can clearly communicate why the best candidates should join your company and what you offer to help them succeed.

Create value, be proactive and promote yourself. Get out there on LinkedIn and become visible to your next great hire!

Thanks for those great tips Larry!

If you need help attracting A players to your team, I can help. Together we can get your online presence in the right shape to attract them! Schedule some time with me and I’ll give you a few ideas and here’s a free guide to get you started. 

The post 2 LinkedIn Profile Secrets For Hiring Top Salespeople appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

What once was old can always be new again, and that includes your content.

Here’s what you need to know about repurposing content the right way.

Key Takeaways

• Repurposing is great for both your bottom line and your content’s visibility.
• Penalties for repurposing content are incredibly rare, so there’s no need to worry about duplicate content.
• Focus on adding value and/or reswizzling formats when repurposing old content, and your audiences won’t get bored.

Whoever said, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” never repurposed their content. So, let’s talk about how repurposing content is one of the greatest content creation approaches we can almost guarantee you’re not doing enough of today.

The Benefits of Repurposing Content

Repurposing content is an approach that takes existing, published content, refreshes it, remixes it, and puts an entirely new spin on it to create something totally new and wonderfully different. I’m a huge fan of repurposing content for two main reasons:

1. Maximize your content investments.

Contrary to popular belief, content isn’t free. In fact, it’s actually quite expensive to create. It takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money, and those are things that not every marketing department or brand has excess amounts of. Repurposing content can absolutely help maximize the existing investments we’ve already made.

2. Refresh existing content.

You, like most brands, probably have a mountain of content created already. When we’re solely focused on creating new content, we keep adding to that mountain. And that means that old content, even if it’s really good, doesn’t get seen by users because it gets buried under all that new content. Repurposing content really can take a lot of that great, old content and give it a breath of fresh air (and some much-needed visibility).

Dispelling the Myths of Repurposing Content

When it comes to repurposing content, there are a few myths to clear up. Just know that the big takeaway here is that repurposing content is one of the absolute best things you can do for your budget, your content calendar and, most importantly, your audiences.

Repurposing myth #1: You’re going to be penalized for having duplicate content.

Obviously, we don’t want to be penalized by search engines or even cause frustration to users by having duplicate content. But, remember, repurposing isn’t duplication, and it’s definitely not a copy and paste approach. Instead, it’s a remix and refresh approach.

When you remix and refresh your content, you’re taking a white paper and turning it into a blog post series or taking a blog post and turning it into an infographic. You’re not copying and pasting—you’re providing something new and different. That means search engines and users aren’t really going to see that as the same content.

In addition, you would have to repurpose incredibly large amounts of content and also be seen as having malicious intent for duplicating that content. Again, that’s not what we’re doing here.

Repurposing myth #2: You can’t reuse other people’s content.

This simply isn’t true. Sometimes the best content on a specific topic we want to write about will come from other people, and that’s okay. If somebody created a framework or published a blog or has an infographic that you have feedback on or you can provide your own take on, by all means, you should use that content and provide your point of view on it. But before you do, there are a few rules you must follow:

• Ask for permission: If you’re repurposing other people’s work, like building a blog post around their framework or using their photos in a whitepaper, you absolutely want to ask for permission and let them know what you’re going to do with their content before you repurpose it.
• Give credit where credit’s due: Always, every time, no exceptions. Make sure you credit them in the final published work, and link to the original source content, too. It’s the right thing to do because paying homage is cool, but theft is not.

Repurposing myth #3: Your audiences are going to be bored.

Again, content repurposing isn’t copying and pasting. If you publish and post the same content on every channel, over and over and over again, yeah, your audiences will be bored. But, as we talked about before, if you take an infographic and you turn it into social teasers, or if you take a white paper and turn it into a blog post series, it’s going to be new and it’s going to be different. And as long as you’re adding value and you’re providing a reason for readers to read that content again, you’re going to be okay. Also, focus on other channels as well. You don’t have to keep republishing in the same channel that that original content was published in.

How to Repurpose Content

There are several approaches you can take to repurposing content, which we’ve outlined below. But just know that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to repurposing. It really comes down to what that existing content looks like, what format it’s in, how outdated it is, and your goals for repurposing. Once you determine that, it’ll be a lot easier to repurpose content and see the impact it can have on your content, goals and audiences.

Start in the content planning stages: As Amy Woods, the Founder of Content 10x, said on the Social Pros podcast, “Content repurposing should not be an afterthought. Create content with repurposing in mind.” Trust us, planning upfront will make it a lot easier to repurpose down the road.

Use the 1:8 rule for content atomization: At Convince & Convert, we love atomizing content, which is repurposing content. We use the 1:8 rule, which means that for every big piece of content we create, we should be able to get at least 8 smaller pieces of content from it. So, let’s use our 2019 Best Websites Among America’s Top University’s report. That’s one huge piece of content, which means we could do at least eight smaller pieces of content, such as:

• Webinar to review findings and criteria
• Social-formatted infographic of the top 3 universities
• Instagram + Facebook Stories reveal of the top 5
• Blog post summary of the criteria we used, plus a link to download
• Blog post about how to conduct a website audit like the one we conducted
• Social quote cards of key snippets from the report
• Blog post summarizing findings and highlights
• Downloadable report charts and graphics for others to repurpose too.

Update existing content: Maybe you have some greatest hits content that’s still pulling in traffic, but some links or examples are really out of date. In that case, just give your content a slight refresh and republish it. Oh, and be sure to also add some new content updates while you’re there, even if it’s just an extra insight, updated stat, or additional examples. That way, you can bring back audiences that may have already seen it. That’s actually exactly what we did with this post, and what we do with a lot of C&C content, because references and links can get out of date fairly quickly, depending on the topic.

Just like Doc Martens, vinyl records, and acid wash jeans, what once was old can always be new again, and that includes our content.

Want ideas on the different ways you can repurpose your content? Check out Jay Baer’s list of ways and places to atomize your content. Or maybe you need some content inspiration altogether? Then you need our blog on 16 Techniques to Power Up Your Content Creation.

The post How to Repurpose Your Content the Right Way appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Your Resume Should Be One Page, and That Is a Good Thing

Resumes have a lot of rules. To some people, it feels like too many. I was reminded of this recently while taking a live call as an expert on Ryan Foland’s radio show, Get Notified. The caller was a self-identified millennial job seeker who had a bone to pick about the one-page requirement for resumes. She felt with millennials becoming the majority in the workforce, old guidelines should no longer apply. A single page resume, from her perspective, could not contain all her peers had to offer. That viewpoint inspired me to share my feelings on the topic since I know a lot of people worry about this particular resume tenet.

When it comes to resume length, it is typically determined by your amount of experience in your field. The basic recommendation goes like this: if you have less than 10 years of experience, a one-page resume is your maximum. No discussion! If you have over 10 years of experience, you should stick to a two-page limit. The caveat is that every item that goes onto that second page better add massive value because if the first page doesn’t sell you, no one will ever read that far! If that isn’t reason enough to get on board with the one sheet concept, here are three more.

1. Attention spans are short.

Some experts may say that in the digital age the length of your resume doesn’t really matter. I’d say that’s rubbish; people’s attention spans are less than a gnat’s these days. People are in information overload. That makes delivering all the goods in one page a necessity. If somebody really wants to know more, which is the true purpose of the resume, they can look you up on LinkedIn or give you a call. We live in a society of scrollers and skimmers that want news in bite-size chunks. Your resume is no exception.

2. You’ll land more interviews.

HR needs you to be succinct. They review hundreds of resumes for each opening, which requires them to identify core points quickly. If they are buried in a lengthy resume they can’t do their job efficiently and it often leads to your resume landing in the trash. Six seconds is long enough to make an impression, but it’s not long enough to read a biography. A resume that is concise and cleanly laid out will always outperform its opposite.

3. It forces you to get focused.

When space is a hot commodity, you can’t rattle on with long-winded prose or paragraphs. You have to get real specific real fast; every item you put on that resume needs to be valuable. There is no room for anything else. It forces your hand, which for most people is the only way you can get them to cut the BS. By leaving duties, and other excess filler on the cutting room floor, you automatically cut to your best stuff. Your unique brand becomes crystal clear which creates a much more persuasive and compelling resume. By default, this rule forces you to write a stronger resume. How can you be mad at that?

Millennials that think this is a rule to rebel against, I challenge you to do the opposite. Be so bold as to embrace the single page and make it exceptional. Be the generation that knows their value, what it means to employers, and how to pitch it to them in a way that makes you stand out rather than get lost in a sea of sameness.

Embrace the simplicity of focusing solely on your distinctive talents and you’ll never worry about the length of your resume again.

Push notification is the new big boy in town! You might already know the basics of how to use them, but crafting push notifications that users actually want to receive is a true art form. Let’s quickly go over the essentials: Creating the perfect push notification starts with understanding how customers interact with your app. The more you know about your users, the more personalized you can make your push notifications. These messages should enhance the customer experience, not harm it. So with every new push notification, users should feel satisfied and happy about your brand.

But knowing all this information doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to write the actual push notification. These hacks will help you create killer copy for every single push notification you send out.

1. Be Authentic

The number one thing customers want from brands is honesty. And this holds true for push notifications as well. Customers can spot an inauthentic brand from a mile away, so don’t try too hard or force yourself onto customers. Be consistent when it comes to writing your push notifications, staying true to your brand voice and making sure it aligns with your web and email communication. According to Peopledesign, “authenticity speaks volumes. Brands that tell a genuine, honest story resonate with people. People believe in honest brands.” iShare combines honesty and transparency with a little bit of sass in their push notification.

Action step: When you have written out a push notification, take a moment to reflect on the voice and tone it conveys. Does it match your brand identity? Will it makes sense to customers as part of your larger brand narrative?

2. Be Valuable

If anything, your push notifications should add value to your customers’ daily life. Be helpful and engaging, instead of annoying. Over 50% of app users find push notifications annoying. The other half finds them useful, but only if the content includes valuable information. You exist in the lives of your customers for one ultimate purpose: to help them accomplish something. So make sure you deliver on this! The goal is for users to look forward to your messages. Uber, for example, helps its users save money by notifying them of dropping rates in the area.

Action step: No matter what type of company you are, you have promised to make some part of their life easier, better, more beautiful, or more fun. Dig into this notion to guide your push notifications. Why are you useful, or even indispensable?

3.Be Funny

To summarize millennials: “They want funny. Funny lets them know you see the world through their eyes. Funny lets them reinforce their own online presence with content they can share with everyone on their list”, says Acxiom Marketing. For brands, it’s about not taking themselves too seriously and being brave enough to share it with their audience. Simon Circles, a mobile game, knows how to get a laugh on demand.

Action step: Follow comedians on Twitter, collect viral memes and find companies that you think do humor right. Create a folder with all these pieces, so you can draw inspiration from it whenever you’re not feeling funny.

4. Be To-The-Point

It’s all about brevity these days. Push notifications are the perfect way to counter our shorter attention spans. Push notifications, by design, are brief. So don’t abuse this format by trying to cram too much in. Remember, the best performing push messages are under 25 characters. It’s not only about being being brief, it’s also being clear. If you are struggling to convey the message (as you are trying to be authentic, funny and to-the-point), just come out and say it. Sometimes the simplest messages get the job done. Netflix knows how to delight their customers with short and personalized messages based their watching habits.

Action step: Write two different versions of the same push notification and then A/B test them. You will start discovering your own patterns of what works and what doesn’t, as well as the perfect balance between eloquent and straightforward.

5. Be Empathic

Empathy is “the ability to step into the shoes of another person, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our actions.” This might be a lot to ask of a company’s push notifications, but it can be done! Let your users know that you feel their struggle, pain, happiness or excitement. Try to understand where they are coming from, as this will help you to create the perfect and personalised push notification – just like the app Sunshine did.

Action step: Social media is a powerful tool at your disposal. Use your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest profiles to become more empathic. Look at the comments and questions to uncover your customer’s hopes, dreams and challenges and how they intersect with your brand.

6.Be In The Know

It’s common advice in marketing to “ride the wave” of current events. Push notifications are a great way to join the discussion of current events and trends. Whether it’s a football game or the season finale of The Big Bang Theory, here’s your chance to be creative and let your brand’s personality shine through. Minibar, a liquor delivery company, found a great way to insert themselves in the US Election conversation.

Action step: Download a holiday calendar – preferable one that includes national days like “Find a Rainbow Day” – and keep it at handy when you are creating push notifications. Almost every day the internet is celebrating something, making it a marketing gold mine!

Combine basic best practices with these copywriting tips, and you’ll master the art of writing push notifications that users actually want to receive. Do you have any tips for writing effective push notifications? Share them in the comments.

Riches are in the niches!

For everyone with a niche this was always music to their ears but for those that grew up like me and were passionate about multiple things and could never answer the question “What do you want to do when you grow up” it made us cringe.

On this episode of my FOMOFanz podcast, I discuss the value of being a generalist or what I like to say “a swiss-army knife of skillsets” in this world of digital change. I also ask these questions for us to ponder change and the future of work:

• Are we raising kids to picture one future when that picture we all know will always change?
• Asking what do you want to be when you grow up, encourages kids to believe they’ve failed when they change what they want to be.
• If you are getting rich with a niche, are you afraid the robots will take your job? How to prepare for that.
• Value of having a learning mindset and approach to everything in life
• Are businesses today structured to prevent change agents, outside the box thinkers and those without a niche?
• How can we change the incentives and success measurement of those employees that have many niche’s and passions.
• Value of building a community focused business to allow the collaboration of a 4 generation workforce
• Future of Work: Generalist driven or Specialist focused?

I hope you enjoyed this episode as I recorded it as a live video with my community but thanks to the feedback and questions, I felt I had to rip the audio into the podcast for you the podcast community.

Three Events I’m speaking at in April and May that are proof of my “non-niche” approach:

• Millennial Mindset: Change, Collaboration and Community at Marketo: #MKTG
• Think Like A Fan: How to grow your business and tell your digital story! Digital Odense, Denmark
• Be Yourself: Why you must invest in your digital first impression! Women’s Expo Washington D.C.

Watch the live video recording of this episode on my Periscope account:

Why the RICHES aren't in the NICHES anymore! #MillennialMindset #BeYourself https://t.co/garsowzqwZ

— Brian Fanzo (@iSocialFanz) April 18, 2017

When tasked to scale a team from 0 to 10 reps in a matter of months, with no historical success— we needed a surefire way to maximize “at bats” and maintain cycle velocity with solid sales cycle management.

What is Sales Cycle Management? 

Sales cycle management is keeping track of what happens during all of the sales life cycle stages, and adjusting to the buyer based on their behaviors during those key phases.

The sales cycle stages can vary greatly depending on mid-market vs enterprise, but they all stem from the process outlined below:

MEDDIC has traditionally been applied to Enterprise selling motions and acts to qualify complex B2B sales opportunities. Whether you’re selling high-volume/reduced ACV deals or whale sized enterprise deals, you can leverage MEDDIC and Challenger Sales Methodology in your sales cycle management to proactively understand risk, leave your audience with actionable takeaways, and retain desirable sales cycle length.

Image Credit: Daniel Nilsson

What’s MEDDIC?

• Metrics: How are your prospects measured…and what is the economic impact of your solution when mapped to their metrics?

• Economic Buyer(s): Who has the authority to sign off on a purchase?

• Decision Criteria: What does your solution or a similar offering need to have (features) and need to accomplish (value) to influence a purchasing decision?

• Decision Process: Functionally, who and how does a purchase happen in your prospect’s organization?

• Identification of Pain(s): Where does it hurt (emotional, rational, and economic) and is it linked to compelling events?

• Champion(s): Have you created a raging fan internally who can help influence and drive a win for both organizations?

If you’re able to understand your buyer’s unique situation and recognize MEDDIC during your initial discovery conversation—the likelihood of a streamlined sales opportunity dramatically skyrockets.

As Jacco vanderKooij critically highlights, please refrain from “selling” your solution before truly understanding how you and your solution helps your buyer:

“Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.”

Your discovery calls should serve as active learning sessions for your prospects. With a mutual upfront contract, you and your buyer can both agree that the discussion will be mutually beneficial—so your conversation is relevant, tailored, and move to next steps if both parties agree there is a fit.

Applying Sales Cycle Management Principles

Ask about their role… it’s okay to make concrete assumptions at this point, it allows you to ask specific questions about their sales metrics.

A few examples for Metrics: As the VP of Sales, I understand it’s top of mind for you and your reps to hit and exceed quota. What are some of the key-initiatives you have in mind to drive higher attainment from your new hires?

Selling to an SDR Leader? They are typically measured by the following metrics:

• Sales Qualified Opportunities
• Meetings Booked/Occurred
• Percentage of Closed-Won Opportunities

Most often, it’s a mixture of all the above. You can dive into what conversion rates and concrete metrics they are looking to improve, and how your solution can help move the needle.

Economic Buyers & Your Champion: Identify who you are speaking with and what you need to do to gain ground with an Economic Buyer. Most decisions in today’s selling world require agreement from multiple stakeholders, even in the smallest of organizations.

It is vital you establish an internal champion who can assist in creating ground-swell to the decision makers. A champion can prove to be as helpful as a team member when it comes to sales cycle management. If you’re lucky, your Champion can also be your Economic Buyer!

Decision Criteria: This is ever elusive and is certainly the most difficult to extrapolate. You need to ask great questions to uncover the need-to-haves from the nice-to-haves. It is incredibly important to understand the “Why” behind some of their answers, as it gives clarity to both parties on what is a deal-breaker and what can be made as a concession.

Decision Process & Identification of Pain: Every sales org. should take enablement and coaching seriously—one of the first steps is to identify what questions to ask without it becoming an interrogation. Don’t forget, there are no excuses for a rep who doesn’t self-enable.

• Who else needs to see the solution to make an informed decision?

• How have you purchased a similar tool/solution/platform in the past?

• What does your process look like today and what feedback have you heard from your team?

• What are you currently doing to improve it?

The Challenger Methodology

Even without a full roll out of CEB’s Challenger program, you can leverage the fundamental takeaways from its methodology. When you weave in MEDDIC with Challenger, it becomes an immensely powerful process.

• Teach your buyers something new and actionable – Let them walk away with more than an understanding of your product. They should be able to understand how you differentiate amongst your competition. Show them how your solution can improve their “world of tomorrow”. Make them champions!

• Tailor your conversations and demos to be relevant—I promise that your pre-call research will help you have better sales conversations. Remember the metrics you learned? This is a great time to share how your solution can positively shape those very metrics with a solution like yours. Important business metrics apply to many personas in the same organization. Being relevant throughout your sales cycle management assures consensus among them.

• Take control of the conversations – Especially if they veer off goal. It is your job to directly communicate insightful knowledge without coming off overly aggressive and off putting. Remind your buyer of their decision criteria and reinforce what they shared with you during your last conversation.

Key Takeaways

• Influence: Understand and influence your prospects decision criteria so they walk away with something learned and immediately actionable.

• Stay Ahead of the Curve: Be proactive in the ways your deal can go sour. Identify risk factors before they happen. Learn how your buyer is measured. Examine how their org. makes decisions. Anticipate roadblocks before they happen. 

• Be Relevant: Research and become an expert in your prospect’s company and role. Nothing is worse than a rep not knowing his or her audience.

• One Team, One Goal: Behind every star player, there is an amazing team. Be vocal on your internal asks and leverage every single member of your org. to win.

The post Sales Cycle Management: Expert Strategies to Increase Sales Velocity appeared first on Sales Hacker.

You can’t run your business without sales metrics, but measuring the wrong numbers or misinterpreting these numbers can be just as bad as not having any metrics at all.

For example, you might be getting thousands of visitors to your website per day, but no sales from that web traffic. Or you might have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean anything if none of those contacts lead to meaningful sales conversations.

When it comes to sales emails, just looking at metrics like “number of emails delivered,” “email open rates,” and “response rates” might reassure you, but they don’t actually show real results. In fact, they can even be misleading.

Here’s three sales metrics you should be watching if you want to know how your sales team is really performing.

Sales Metric #1: Quality of contact data

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people waste their sales efforts on bad contact data. You can have the best email templates and sales strategy, but still get no results if you have incorrect or outdated contact information for your prospective customers.

For example, we’ve seen clients become distressed after Google blacklists them when they blast out thousands of emails with a high bounce rate of 20%. It’s hard to keep perfectly accurate contact data because information is constantly decaying as people change jobs, emails, and even first or last names.

However, if you let your email bounce rate get above 10%, you’re almost guaranteed to have problems with email deliverability, especially as you send more emails over time. You might get undelivered emails as a consequence in the beginning, leading to a lower open and response rate, but over time you might even get your email server’s IP blacklisted.

Likewise, you don’t want to waste your sales team’s time with emailing and calling people with the wrong information.

Sales Metric #2: Positive email response rate

It’s exciting to get lots of responses to your sales emails, but just looking at “response rate” as a number will count a lot of “false positives.” For example, many email analytics tools will automatically count any response, including “OOO” (out of office reminders), and other misleading auto-responders, as well as negative responses.

This becomes especially problematic when people are sending multiple emails across a sales email campaign, since there are more chances for responses that aren’t actually positive. It’s really important to keep track of positive response rates as well as negative, or unsubscribe requests, since the latter are likely to be associated with spam complaints.

With regards to positive response rates, you can also analyze your emails for specific keywords that appear to be recurring across similar sales emails. In general, you should pay special attention to positive responses that lead to fruitful sales conversations, and ideally close deals.

Sales Metric #3: Quality of sales conversations

One of our clients was complaining that our sales emails were getting them lots of responses, but they weren’t having enough quality sales conversations that they could actually close. At first, I thought that our emails might not contain enough “disqualifiers.” This means that the emails were actually so compelling that too many people were responding, even if these people weren’t really qualified to buy from them.

After digging into their analytics and speaking with one of their salespeople, I figured out what was really happening. The sales emails were fine, and they were in fact targeting the right people, but their salespeople’s responses didn’t match our emails.

While our emails were thoughtful and more casual, the salespeople would aggressively try to get the prospective customer on the phone as soon as someone responded to their email. Sometimes buyers would ask follow-up questions in response to the salesperson’s email, and the salesperson would ignore it, and just send them a link to their calendar.

Keeping track of the quality of your sales conversation past the initial contact can help you proactively spot “leakage” in your sales pipeline that would otherwise lead to lost revenue.

You have probably made an impulse buying decision before. According to Invespcro, 80% of shoppers have at one time made an impulse purchase. Moreover, UIE found that impulse purchases account for nearly 40% of all ecommerce purchases. As such, many retailers are strategizing on how to influence customers to make impulse buying decisions in order to reduce cart abandonment and drive sales.

Infographic source – Impulse Buying Persona – Statistics and trends

Impulsive consumers can be characterized as those who use their emotions to make purchases decisions. Knowing this will help you to develop a marketing strategy to help you improve your sales.

It is important to note that everyone uses logic and emotion to make purchases. However, impulsive buyers use more of emotion than logic when making buying decisions. In short, impulsive customers:

• Are risk takers
• Are driven by emotion
• Are positive minded, upbeat and gregarious
• Are competitive
• Respond visually
• Defy logic
• Prefer instant gratification.

So the best approach to take is to assume that most of your customers are impulsive and are more likely to convert than logical buyers.

Here are few tips on how to increase impulse purchases on your online store.

Create a great website

Your website is everything. It is your online version of shop front. Make it persuasive and useful. It should have answers to all your customers’ questions. However, you should be careful to make it appropriate for both impulsive and neurotic buyers. For instance, if you create with only impulse buyers in mind, you are likely to lose methodological consumers.

Having said that, a website is conducive to impulse buyers if it is useful, easy to use, attractive and easy to navigate. Perform user tests to come up with the right combination of elements.

One study found that most impulse purchases were made via category links as opposed to direct product searches. Therefore, it is important to ensure your navigation is great.

Increase your site’s credibility and trustworthiness

More people are likely to buy from you if you are credible and trustworthy. There are many ways to make your site more trustworthy and credible. It is recommended that you:

• Include reviews and ratings on your site
• Include warranties and money-back guarantees in your offers
• Offer free shipping and friendly return policies
• Offer low prices and quality products

Ensure your site is mobile responsive

Mobile conversions will soon overtake desktop because it is cheaper, more convenient and easily accessible. This makes mobile the perfect domain to optimize for impulse purchases. Statistics from eConsultancy show that mobile is likely to increase impulse purchase by 20%. The idea is to create a conducive environment for online shopping.

Hit the right psychological trigger

In order to ensure your merchandise are purchased, you need tp entice the customer by hitting the following four basic psychological triggers in your marketing messages:

Urgency—make people see the urgency of buying the product NOW. Consider imposing time limits on your offers.

Value—clearly point out the value your customers would be getting if they purchase your product.

Scarcy—tell them that they risk missing out on the product if they don’t purchase it now. However, this also depends on the type of product you are selling.

What Personality and Poker Have to Do with Innovation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Stephen Shapiro
Podcast Transcript

Getting sales and marketing on the same page is an age-old problem for many organizations. While they may actually have objectives that are at odds, there’s also a good chance the people and personalities could be mismatched as well.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Stephen Shapiro, a leading keynote speaker, author, and advisor. He and I discuss what our personalities and poker have to do with innovation.

Shapiro cultivates innovation by showing leaders and their teams how to approach, tackle and solve their business challenges. Applying the knowledge he has accrued over decades in the industry, Shapiro is able to see what others can’t: opportunities to improve innovation models and the cultures that support them.

Questions I ask Stephen Shapiro:

• What is the point of Personality Poker?
• How do you play Personality Poker?
• What are the differences between Personality Poker and other test-based personality tests, such as Myers-Briggs?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• How people insulate themselves from innovation
• Why hanging out with people of various personalities and industries is essential for innovation
• What you can learn about yourself and your organization by playing Personality Poker

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Stephen Shapiro:

• Learn more about Stephen Shapiro.
• Learn more about Personality Poker.
• Read Shapiro’s blog.
• Connect on Facebook.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Subscribe to YouTube channel.
• Connect on LinkedIn.
• Email stephen@stephenshapiro.com.

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This week’s episode is also brought to you by ActiveCampaign. This is my new go-to CRM, ESP, and marketing automation platform. With its low cost, any size of business can use it. Starting at $19/month, you can keep track of your clients, see who’s visiting your website, and follow-up based on behavior. Learn more here.

Voicemails are common sales tools found within a company’s operations to ensure that leads turn into actual opportunities. Contrary to what most say, voicemails are thriving tools used by most sales teams, and its benefits, once exploited, will prove beneficial to the sales process. It is one thing to use voicemails in your sales process, but it’s another to optimize its potential. On the surface, the usage of voicemails might seem like a piece of cake, but some, if not most, members of the sales force tend to misuse it, thus losing its effectiveness. Here are common voicemail usage problems:

First, the error might lie within your sales reps. At times, reps, when unprepared, might end up blurting out pitches that clients wouldn’t even bother listening to. Often, reps who commit this mistake find themselves pondering on why they don’t receive return calls from clients. A remedy for this would be to create standard sales pitch for all your reps. Ensure that their spiels are uttered in a natural tone, or else, it might come off as robotic and insincere. Obviously rehearsed voicemail scripts easily turn off clients, and would defeat the purpose of even having one.

Second, reps tend to overlook one important aspect of sending voicemails: stating a clear objective. A sound reason for why one is sending a certain voicemail is the best foundation for an effective pitch. Voicemails with vague goals are often dismissed by clients who have no time deciphering the message you hope to send across.

Here are objectives for every voicemail you send to your clients listed by IA Magazine:

The Initial Voicemail

• The ultimate goal, of course, is to get a call back from your prospects
• Next goal would be the desire to advance the sales call. Spark your client’s interest regarding your product
• Ensure that you have locked in the client, and that they would surely take the next call from you.
• Veer away from the typical phrases used by most reps

The Follow-Up Voicemail

• Now you’ve got the client interested, take it to the next level. Feed your prospect with more information regarding your product
• Always be cautious to refine your eagerness to sell your product. This isn’t a powerpoint presentation to the client, it’s a dialogue. Have a conversation, don’t deliver a strict sales pitch.

Another problem that renders voicemails ineffective are the many pauses, filler words, and speech buckles in a sales rep’s spiel. Not only does this turn off the person on the other end of the line, but it also depreciates the value of the company you work for. These mishaps in sales reps’ speech is caused by various factors.

• Insufficient product knowledge
• Lack of personable skills
• Constant self-doubt

Lastly, probably the main reason why prospects never call reps back is because they never even gave their clients a compelling reason to do so. A voicemail that seeks to get a follow-up should be three things: enticing, exciting, and enthusiastic. These three things, when injected in your sales pitches will add color to an, otherwise, dull voicemail.

Sales Voicemail Strategies

1. Nothing More Than 30 Seconds

Salesforce notes that the best voicemail message usually lasts for no longer than 30 seconds. The best way to ensure that you don’t go beyond the time is to practice at home; or even while at the office, with a stopwatch. Keep trimming your spiel until you reach any time below 30 seconds. Within this time limit you’ve set for yourself, you will have to include vital information like: a catchy opening line; and a closing line where you restate your name and your company, with a main line of contact where the client can reach you.

2. Never Mention Previous Unreturned Calls

Tried calling a lead for more than three times? That’s okay. Just don’t mention that when the opportunity for you to introduce yourself comes. Never bring back the ghosts of the past. It’s just a waste of the 30 second limit you’ve set for yourself. And quite honestly, you’re client wouldn’t even bother listening to a voicemail with you just blabbering about how they didn’t return your previous calls.

3. Keep The Volume of Information to a Minimum

Ring.Iq’s tip for sending the best sales voicemail is to entice your prospective client with only bits of information. Lure them in with bits of information, and keep them wanting more and more, pretty much like how film teasers work. This would also work to your benefit, as you would have more to say for the next few follow-up calls you make to them.

4. Pick the Perfect Time to Leave Your Voicemail

As tedious as it may sound, it also helps to study your prospects working cycle—the hours when they’re at their busiest, and their down times. Time your voicemails at the points when they would have the luxury to actually listen and think about your voicemail. Best times to leave your voicemails would either be as soon as they get to the office in the morning; or in the evening at the hours close to the end of their shifts.

5. Inject a Sense of Immediacy

This tip is quite tricky, and requires a touch of humility in the part of the rep. Fabricate timeframes for you and your prospect to work around with. In your fictional timeframe, State a specific time in which you expect a return call from them, or a time when you’d be calling them for a follow-up. Just in case they don’t return your call, you’ll always have the “follow-up time” you’ve set as your excuse to call them again.

6. Always Espouse Confidence

There is no place for nerves when sending voicemails. Always be sure of what you say, and be aware of your tone. The tone of your voice shouldn’t be too confident that it sounds arrogant, and should not be too monotonous that it sounds rehearsed and robotic.

7. Leave One Contact Email

Always make sure that you leave one contact detail, preferably either the mobile number or the e-mail address you use for work. Insert this in the closing line of your initial voicemail to ensure a return call from your prospect.

8. Find a Connection Between Yourself and the Client

Exercise your PR skills and try to personalize your messages with injecting information that assimilate you with your prospect. Don’t force it, but if by any chance you have a certain professional connection with your client don’t hesitate to include that in your voicemail.

Technology has helped shape voicemails into integral parts of the sales process. Previously, this method of tapping prospects halted at just plain verbal follow-up messages; but now, it has developed into visual voicemail programs. This new form allows your sales staff to automatically send text messages to your potential clients’ mobile phones as the technology transcribes the initial voicemail you leave them.

It is important to take advantage of such advancements to ensure the consistency of the sales process. Combine this progressive approach with the strategies this article has laid out for you, and this will ensure a positive development in your efficiency as a member of the sales force. Keep in mind that all these tips are nothing unless you put it into actual use.

As many marketing professionals know, there is often a delicate relationship with the sales team. On one hand, you need their input and buy-in to create marketing initiatives that are useful and effective. On the other hand, you want to closely control the brand and ensure all initiatives align with your overall B2B brand.

Experienced marketing professionals know that the sales team can provide a wealth of information, suggestions, and ideas. However, one of the main struggles that many marketing professionals experience is when to approach sales for feedback (or enable them to give feedback).

In an effort to make things easier for marketing teams, ensure initiatives are effective, and to make the entire process efficient, we’ve outlined the best times for sales to give feedback to marketing.

Input Stage – Before Rollout

Sales can be a wonderful source for suggestions and ideas, as mentioned earlier. However, individual salespeople are often focused on their own goals and revenue rather than the overall brand message of the company. For this reason, it’s important to get their input but to carefully translate it into B2B branding and marketing initiatives that will be effective for the entire company.

A great time for the sales team to provide input or feedback on past initiatives is before new initiatives are ever rolled out – ideally during the idea stage. They are often a great resource for sharing what is working, what prospects are responding to, and what prospects and clients haven’t cared for in the past.

Additionally, the sales team can provide detailed information about every stage of the sales process from the beginning, middle and end of lead nurturing to the closing of the deal. B2B marketers can get a better understanding of where prospects are at during different stages of the funnel and what types of questions they have or needs to be met.

Feedback Stage – Post Rollout

Patience is definitely a virtue but is not a prerequisite for a salesperson. Remember that many salespeople live in a monthly cycle in which they have a quota to meet for closed deals. (This might be longer for B2B companies where the sales cycle is often longer than a month, but you get the idea.) However, marketing initiatives rarely deliver immediately. In fact, many initiatives take time to ramp up and start showing results.

While it may be tempting to ask sales about new marketing initiatives a week after they have rolled out, it’s far too soon to gauge whether a campaign is actually working. Instead, it’s more effective to have a longer sample timeline, such as three months. This enables the marketing team to take a more holistic, quantitative look at the initiatives to dismiss any anomalies.

Once the marketing team has a good data set on the initiatives, it’s time to check back in with sales to get their qualitative feedback. Marketing can see the number of leads sent to the sales team, but the sales team can share information on the quality of the leads, the buying intent, the closing rate, etc. This is especially helpful in the case of larger deals that take longer to close. For example, if a marketing team sends 40 marketing qualified leads (MQLs) but only three have closed after three months, it may seem like the initiatives aren’t working. However, sales can let marketing know that 15 or so of the MQLs are still in the nurturing process and reviewing proposals.

Closed Loop Feedback

At the end of the day, marketing and sales are looking to close deals and continually attract new prospects into the sales funnel. This feedback enables the marketing team to blend anecdotal information with quantitative metrics to determine the true effectiveness of marketing initiatives.

“If you want to go upmarket, which you absolutely must to grow, you have to go outbound. Winning large customers is much more about causing sale, not just catching one.”— Ken Krogue, President and Founder, InsideSales.com

Account-based marketing is quickly gaining popularity. It’s a strategy that aligns sales, business development and marketing around the potential deals that can have the most impact on a company’s future revenues. To execute account-based marketing tactics, you will likely need to transform the approach of your business developers.

The Role of the Business Developer in Account-Based Marketing

How do the account-based business developer’s activities differ from those of typical telesales representatives?

The job of the account-based business developer is to open doors at the big accounts that matter most. So, rather than simply qualifying inbound leads, they use outbound tactics — phone, email and social selling — to stir up sales opportunities with high-value prospects. Based on in-depth research, reps contact prospects in a personalized way that provides value. The emphasis is on long-term gains, not quick hits.

Even though the sales, marketing and business development people work together to plan and implement account-based marketing tactics, the business development reps are the first to connect with prospects. And that connection is person-to-person.

The Preconditions for Account-Based Marketing Success

This human way of marketing and selling works well if you have the foundation in place, which includes:

• An accurate profile of your ideal customer
• Agreement between marketing and sales that account-based marketing is the right strategy and a readiness to march forward in lockstep

Select Accounts You’d Love to Land

Before your reps can do anything, you need to select your target accounts. Start by determining the firmographics of your best accounts and those companies you would like to add to your roster of customers. You want to target companies whose firmographics match this profile.

The catch, however, is that not all of them are in the market for what you sell. So you need to add a dose of predictive marketing — analytics of online activities that can predict buyer intent. By bumping your ideal customer profile up against data that tells you who is in the market, you’ll come up with a list of organizations that are worth a dogged pursuit.

Build Your Database

Next, determine who you want your reps connecting with at each account. It’s not one person. You need to reach out to the entire web of individuals involved in the buying process — buyers, influencers, decision makers, users and gatekeepers. To increase the chance of a favorable deal, your reps must build relationships with as many of these individuals as possible.

Build up your database with contacts at your targeted accounts who you suspect are members of the buying team. You can gather some of this information using online tools. Supplement it when you start talking with people at the company. Don’t put this sleuthing task on the shoulders of your sales people. You pay them too well for such a time-consuming activity. Plus, it’s not what they do best. Business developers and marketing personnel can piece together the data you need.

Also, remember that mapping the lay of the land inside a company is not a one-and-done task. You’re dealing with a live organism. People move onward and upward. So update your information as necessary.

Reach Out and Convert Large Accounts

When your business development reps reach out, they need to do so in a way that provides value, showing they understand the challenges facing a particular business and industry and providing insights that help. So they should research the companies before they pick up the phone to understand their problems.

They can make initial contact using the phone, a personal email or via social media. All prospects are different, so you never know which method works best until you try it out. However, in general, you’ll get best results by employing two or three channels.

Of all the channels, however, the phone is probably most important. That’s because it’s the most personal medium for developing a relationship. Also, it allows for a two-way conversation in which you can gather intelligence that enables you to provide greater value in your future communications. Also, you’ll likely learn that each division and department within a large enterprise has different needs, budget levels, buying processes and timelines to make their decision. Gaining this information enables you to customize your approach further and stand out from your competitors.

Of course, you won’t always reach the people you call. Don’t give up though. Make friends with voicemail. Even though most business people will not return the call, they will listen to it. Treat it as a stepping stone. If the contact likes what a rep has to say, they may be more likely to respond later to an email or pick up the phone the next time the rep calls. For the voicemail to make such an impact, it must be positive, tailored and provide value. If the contact can quickly answer what’s in it for them, he or she is more likely to respond.

For some weeks, I’ve been on the war path about emerging trends in sales. We see the same issues and trends in too many blog posts/books, at every conference, and in the social channels.

The focus in much of our discussions on selling is about us–sales people.

We see discussions focused on increasing specialization in sales–actually adaptations of the Toyota Production System. We have highly focused roles, each role focuses on it’s job in the sales process, once complete, the widget–I mean customer, is passed to the next function, then the next, then the next…..on down the sales assembly line.

We see discussions focused on sales messaging….stated differently, “What is it we are trying to tell the customer and how do we say it in the most persuasive manner possible.” If there is any discussion about questioning, it’s focused on questioning to find the starting point to do our messaging, not questioning as a true discovery and collaborative learning process.

We see tools and methods focused on our efficiency, not how they enhance the customer engagement, or help build trusted relationships. We implement bots, autoresponders, power dialers, because they enable us to do more in the same time–forgetting what it feels like to be a customer on the receiving end of these do.

I sit through entire presentations on new trends in selling, where the word customer or buyer may never be mentioned. If it is, the number of mentions is a fraction of the number of mentions of sales, sales people, sales technologies, sales efficiency.

While we provide lip service to the words “customer focus,” or “customer buying process,” everything seems focused on us as sellers.

One gets the impression, that if it weren’t for those pesky customers, their needs, fears, challenges, sales would be so easy!

Ironically, customers are the sole reason for sales people to exist! We have no other function than to find and engage customers about THEIR challenges, THEIR goals, THEIR dreams and fears, THEIR businesses.

Yet everything we do seems focused on anything but these.

In survey after survey, customers scream about their concerns about sales people. They say: “Sales people don’t understand them and their businesses, Sales people don’t talk about what they (the customer) cares about, Sales people don’t even understand their own products and how they apply to the customer situation, Sales people don’t understand what’s relevant and important to them (the customer).”

Year after year, the surveys say the same things, yet, despite all the tools, methods, punditry, and billions spent on tools/training, we don’t seem to be changing customer views.

Increasingly, we are driving customers to self-service. It’s not that they don’t need the help great sales people can provide, it’s just that most sales people aren’t providing that–so they are forced to other means of learning and evaluating alternatives. There is much powerful data that shows the impact of sales people provoking change, helping the customers in their buying process, creating great value from the moment they realize they should do something different through to their selection and implementation of a solution, on to their realizing the value of the solution.

Rather than being on converging paths, increasing our alignment and value creation with customers, we seem to be on diverging paths.

Make no mistake, however, with my diatribe. Sales efficiency is critical, but it is meaningless without the customer. Ironically, when we start our design for sales engagement–if the customer is the starting and end point of all of our efforts, we sales people become highly efficient—as do our customers.

“I won’t get distracted”, you tell yourself, “I’ve got a deadline – I’ll be fine”.

Next thing you know you’re looking at the goals-per-game statistics for second division Scottish soccer team Raith Rovers from their 1976/77 season.

I know because it happened to me. It was 1.15 goals-per-game. In the league only – not including cups.

This is why I’ve had to drill myself to be able to work effectively, and why I’m telling you how to avoid distractions today.

Don’t worry, it’s not rocket science – by focusing on 4 key areas I’ve unleashed supercharged professional self:

• Planning and preparation
• Productivity tips and tricks
• Team communication
• Processes and workflows

After all, it’s one thing to know how to stop procrastinating, but another entirely to be more productive.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

Once you manage to start working, there’s a limited amount of time before you’ll probably lose focus again. I’ve found this window tends to be an hour.

Of course, that depends on how well rested, fed, and watered you are, and on the environment you work in. You need to give yourself time to relax and plenty of sleep, eat a decent diet, and not put yourself somewhere where other sources are vying for your attention.

That initial period of sustained attention span is your golden hour. Just like how a film director or photographer has to catch the morning or evening light to find that beautiful moment which will make their work shine, so too do you need to latch onto this golden moment to power the rest of your day.

So, for the first half hour or hour of my day, I focus on planning and prioritizing my tasks and work.

I’ll look across my Trello board (where I manage my tasks) and peer at the different cards in front of me. If I’m going to done one of them today, I’ll drag it into my “To Do” column. By doing this I’ve specified what my tasks for the day will be, both to myself and to any colleagues who want to check up on me. More importantly, I have also specified what my tasks for the day won’t be.

I don’t need to think about the other projects I have or the other responsibilities that rest on my shoulders. Today I am doing these tasks and these tasks only. Clarity.

My second step is to delve into each task and plan my approach. If I have an article to write, I’ll open up the bullet point note taking app Workflowy. This nifty piece of kit provides a really simple way to pull ideas and plans together and store information inside collapsible lists. With its intuitive and minimal design, there’s little to distract me and I can focus my thoughts.

Once I’ve finished my planning and preparation, I’m able to crack on with the rest of my day.

I’ve divided my day into projects, and projects into smaller tasks. This stops me killing time wondering what I should be doing next, and allows me to focus on one task at a time with the knowledge that, when I finish, I just have to move on to the next.

This is one of the most basic lessons in how to avoid distractions, but having that clarity after months or years of murky task lists is nothing short of a eureka moment.

Use some of these productivity tips and tricks

To keep firing away on all cylinders, you need to add a couple of little productivity aids to your day. The first is super obvious yet it bears repeating.

Eat well. Sleep well. Drink well.

A healthy person makes a productive worker. If you’re operating on 3 hours sleep and catching food as and when you can, you’ll find it hard to focus and hard to create your best work.

Anyone who has gone through the joy (read: torment) of having a newborn baby can attest to this. Apply a little self-care in your life and treat your body the way it deserves to be treated.

Beyond this, acknowledge that distractions are natural. It is impossible to completely rid them from your life, as much as you may want to.

Once you’ve accepted this (however begrudgingly) it’s time to implement a productivity system which helps you manage your distractions and revitalize your moments of focus. One such system I used to employ in a former profession was the Pomodoro Technique.

This method is designed to give you 25 minutes of distraction-free working with 5 minutes of downtime every half hour. Then, after a while, you get a bigger break for lunch. The key to this system is to stick to it religiously. If your Pomodoro timer tells you to stop working, you stop. I don’t care what you’re doing. Don’t break the system.

If you’re like me and use Trello as your task manager, you could consider the tool Pomello. This timer syncs up with your Trello account so that you can tie in your focus sprints with the tasks you’re currently working on. It provides a really good way to handle the balance between how you’re working and what you’re working on.

That said, getting things done is not all about time management. Sometimes you’re struggling to keep your head in the game. Staring at a blank page unable to keep your attention sharp enough to make substantive headway is one of the most irritating aspects of writing. In moments like this, you need a little help.

I know what you’re thinking. Coffee? Well, yes, also coffee. However, creating the right environment to drive your focus is vital to getting anything done.

I have two main writing spaces I work from. Sometimes I’ll work from the office, surrounded by the buzz of productive people and keyboards being slowly worn out. The energy in the room can lift me and help drive me forward in pursuit of productivity. The sounds of fingers hitting keys act as a rallying call propelling me into a frenzy of tech journalism. This is my high energy workspace; great for working through tasks I know how to do and writing articles I know how to write.

My second writing space is at home. A small desk in front of my bay windows with the bright green leaves of the nearby trees encroaching onto my balcony in front of me. This is my space for creativity. This is where I like to plan and think, to research and to edit.

In each of these zones I work differently and need different aids to keep me focused. A simple way to keep your mind on the right track is to soundtrack your day. Like many people listen to upbeat music in the gym, you should listen to the task appropriate tracks in your working hours.

Focus at Will provide curated playlists covering a range of different genres. Their playlists won’t distract you with lyrics and are designed to help you keep your head down and working. Alternatively, Coffitivity provides background noise free of charge, or you could even use curated “focus” playlists on Spotify.

By setting a soundtrack to your working day you can help yourself craft an environment conducive to getting stuff done.

Ditch email for your team communication

Email is my pet peeve.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve never fallen in love with email. Even after attempting to categorize my inbox and employ all the tricks to maintain inbox zero, it still wasn’t working for me the way I want.

This is probably one of the reasons why I’ve fallen so deeply in love with the team communication tool Slack. I first started using it when I was working in software development, and the ease by which I could communicate with my team versus the pain of email with clients sold me immediately.

Because you can communicate in open channels, you can very quickly call other colleagues into a conversation and they easily have all the available information at hand to contribute to the discussion.

Moreover, the instant messaging foundation upon which the concept is built is ideal for quick questions and even quicker responses.

The result of using Slack in our team at Process Street is that I don’t wait around for answers from teammates. When we have a problem, or just want someone to bounce off, we can overcome the issue rapidly and get back to work.

Hiding my Slack from my workspace and setting the notifications to ping me only when needed opens me up to both avoiding distractions and being contactable at the same time. Then, when transitioning between tasks, I’ll open Slack up and browse some of the open channels to see what the team are up to and how others are faring.

Team communication is the way forward when dealing with obstacles to your own work.

Build processes and workflows to guide your day

Ultimately, the core of my work practices is the employment of processes in my day to day activities.

Through mapping out what I need to do and creating processes for those tasks, I’m able to very quickly work my way through the different jobs I have to do. Not only that, but each job is done to a higher quality, as we have a rule across our team to create processes for any task we have to do more than twice.

If I need to run keyword research, I follow a process. If I need to prepare an article for publication, I prepare a process.

Having a process to follow, and understanding your own personal workflows, means you can stay focused on the task at hand rather than thinking ahead about the next step. Once you have processes in place for the different recurring tasks you have to do, you can begin to optimize these processes.

You can look at all the different steps you have put in place and consider whether the process would benefit from any further steps – whether more sub-tasks would result in higher quality. Conversely, if a task is taking you too long, you can look to see whether you have any redundant tasks or whether you’re spending too long on particular sections of your personal process.

Through this approach to process management, you can optimize your processes and maximize your output.

How to avoid distractions: the four tips you need

Those are my four key areas which have boosted my productivity, allowing me to avoid distractions and hit my targets. There’s no magic potion, just careful planning and execution.

It’s worked for me, but what works for you? Let me know how you keep your focus in the comments below.

Dave Asprey wants to live to be 180 years old and I don’t really believe it’s possible. But I admire him for trying.

I’m fine if I die tomorrow. I feel I created good kids. Mission accomplished.

BUT, if I have to live longer, I want to have high quality of life. When I read Dave’s book, “Head Strong” I called him up, “come on my podcast.”

I want to be smarter so I can win more chess games and stop forgetting people’s names. And I don’t want to get sick as I get older.

Here’s what Dave does: he hacks himself. He is his own laboratory. So I asked him what he does to make himself smarter.

I told him: make it easy for me to understand. So I can remember.

Here is some of what he told me:

1) Don’t Eat Damaged Fats

“Between a plate of french fries or a cigarette… the cigarette is actually a better choice. Don’t do either one,” he said. “They’re not good for you, but fried food is really bad for energy production, especially in the brain. And I know that’s bad news. But that’s just science.”

2) Take a Cold Shower

Dave does this everyday. He takes a shower. And then the last 30 seconds are optimal cold water. “As cold as you can get it,” he said.

“I’ve tried it. It’s really hard to do.”

“How many days did you try it?”

“One”

“It takes four days. You are only going to get 10 seconds the first day. And you’ll actually get a headache. Here’s what’s going on: these temperature sensing mitochondria are worried about the Petri dish, (you) dying.”

It’s hard because your body is resisting. The mitochondria send you this panic signal. “Your job is to stand there a little bit longer each day and at the end of the fourth day it feels good.”

“Our bodies will rapidly adjust to cold,” he said. “It sounds weird, but Russians have been doing this and the Swedes…  when you get a little bit of cold, it really helps your mitochondria be resilient. We’re building a resilient battery system. It makes the weak mitochondria die, so they could be replaced with strong ones.”

This is how you evolve better. Teach your body that what you thought is a threat… actually isn’t a threat at all.

“Now your resilience to the environment around you goes up and you burn more calories all day long. We’re talking four days of discomfort. After that it actually feels good to turn the shower on cold.”

3) Sun + Plants

“Remember the ‘Swamp Thing’ comic book? Well… it’s real,” Dave said. “If you eat enough leafy green vegetables and get sunshine, you can actually make extra energy from the chlorophyll the way plants do.”

“It can add a small amount of energy to your system, “he said. “We will get energy from anywhere we can. We’re incredibly well-adapted for an environment of scarcity.”

Why? Because the body lives to reproduce. Not to thrive. But we’ve already mastered reproduction. And as humans, we want to thrive. We want to live beyond the difficult layers of our lives. Beyond the stress.

That’s why Dave biohacks. He used to weigh 300 lbs. He had toxic mold poisoning, which cause “mitochondrial dysfunction.” He was tired all the time. He had no energy.

“I fundamentally believe our core drive is to be nice. If you are well-fed and you have enough energy, your ability to be nice goes up.”

You can start small. You can start with sun and plants.

4) Get Fresh Air

This is critical if you fly in airplanes.

Dave always sits at the front of the plane. He says you should too.  “It’s kind of disgusting, but the good air comes in for the pilots. They actually have their own little air supply. They’re compressing air from outside the plane. And the guys at the back of the plane get the least oxygen… the most used air.”

He gave me a lot of advice. More than I can handle probably. He told me to wear sunglasses on the plane and beware of WIFI dense areas because it affects aging. I’m going to make a list. 10 reasons why my health matters. Then I’m going to reread Dave’s book.

I’ll start small. And I’ll follow the one piece of advice that seemed to matter most in my heart…

5) “Don’t worry about perfection.”

Listen here:

Links and Resources:

• Read Dave’s newest book, “Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks“
• Read New York Times bestseller, “The Bulletproof Diet: Lose up to a Pound a Day, Reclaim Energy and Focus, Upgrade Your Life” by Dave Asprey
• Read Dave’s cookbook “Bulletproof: The Cookbook: Lose Up to a Pound a Day, Increase Your Energy, and End Food Cravings for Good“
• Check out Dave’s blog
• Listen to Dave’s podcast
• Follow Dave on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube

Also mentioned:

• Dave’s top 10 supplements he recommends 
• Ray Kurzweil’s recent blog post “Whole-body vibration may be as effective as regular exercise” 

The post Ep. 224: Dave Asprey – The Way To Evolve Better (in 5 steps) appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Before you create content to boost brand awareness, it’s important to consider whether you’re creating the right type of content.

Take infographics. These are most often used as a link-building tool. That’s fine, if gaining links is your goal. Infographics aren’t so effective, however, if what you really want is to increase awareness of your brand. That’s because publishers tend to favor infographics that keep branding to a bare minimum – usually a logo hidden right at the bottom of the content.

Conversely, if you want to create content that exposes your brand to more people, you may want to look at content such as:

• Guest articles for other publications (choose topics linked to what you do and publications that will publish your bio – ideally, at the top of the post)
• Videos (with you as the star)
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• E-books
• Branded how-to guides
• Third-party media coverage or reviews
• Research with first-hand data
• SlideShare presentations

These are all content types in which it’s OK, if not encouraged, to highlight your brand.

Now that you know what sort of content you should be creating to boost brand awareness, let’s look at four ways of tracking its impact.

1. Social media reach

The social reach of your content is an indicator of the impact it’s having on brand awareness – at least, if it’s the right type of content (as discussed above).

Your content’s social reach indicates impact on brand awareness, says @SujanPatel.
Click To Tweet

Unfortunately, measuring the full social reach of your content isn’t as easy or accurate as it used to be. At the end of 2015, Twitter – a big source of social shares, especially within the digital industry – stopped supporting share count on tweet buttons.

Thankfully, share stats are still available for four of the big social sites – Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google.

How can you get this data?

Shared Count

Shared Count is my favorite tool for checking how many times a piece of content has been shared socially (or at least shared on the four platforms mentioned above).

It’s free and easy to use. Just pop the URL you want to check into the box and click “analyze.”

The main disadvantage to Shared Count is that you can only check one URL at a time. To accurately track the social reach of your content and, in turn, the impact it’s having on brand awareness, you need to check each URL your content appears on.

Get Social

Get Social isn’t a tool I’ve tried personally, although I’d like to, because it appears to offer some exciting features.

Namely this: Get Social promises to track “all social interactions, not just the 20% happening on share buttons.” This is key to getting a complete picture of how widely your content is being shared and what’s working to boost brand awareness and what isn’t.

Unlike Shared Count, it’s not free, but on the plus side, it does more of the hard work for you. Packages start at $32 a month for use on a single website. This will track up to 100,000 visits per month, which should be more than enough for small brands.

2. Brand mentions

Another great way to measure how awareness of your brand is changing is to track how often it is mentioned online.

If you have a unique brand name, this is much easier. If mentions of your brand get mixed up among mentions of a similarly named entity, filtering out chatter could prove to be time-consuming.

However, let’s assume you have a unique name (or at least you don’t share your name with a big brand). Many tools will track where your brand name is being used online.

Mention

Mention is one of the simplest brand-tracking tools as brand tracking is its primary purpose. It crawls websites, forums, blogs, social media platforms, and more to find mentions of your brand and let you know about them –in real time via push notifications or through email alerts.

Pricing starts at $29 a month for a solo plan. This should be adequate for small brands. For $99 a month, you can track your competitors as well. Custom plans are available for bigger brands and agencies.

Google Alerts

Google’s own tracking tool has had its ups and downs (to the point of becoming essentially useless at one time). While it’s hardly the best tool on the market, it is free and easy to use.

If you don’t have the budget for a pro tracking tool, it’s well worth the couple of minutes to set up a Google Alert. Simply type what you want to track into the box and click “create alert.” It is that simple.

No budget for a brand-mention tracking tool? Use @Google Alerts, says @SujanPatel.
Click To Tweet

Bear in mind that the same search syntax you use in a Google search will work with Google Alerts. If you want to ensure that you’re only sent alerts for your multi-word brand name, you need to create an alert using exact match quotes.

For example, if I were to create a Google Alert for my own name I would use “Sujan Patel,” not Sujan Patel.

3. Media mentions

Some marketers measure the impact of their digital campaigns almost solely by the number of links the campaigns generate. They are doing themselves, and their hard work, a disservice.

If publishers are talking about your brand online as a result of the content you’re creating – with or without a link – your content is impacting brand awareness.

Your #content is impacting brand awareness with or without a link, says @SujanPatel.
Click To Tweet

You can track media mentions using the tools mentioned above, but you need to distinguish between media mentions and consumer mentions.

Alternatively, there are tools that provide more detailed insights into online mentions and media coverage. Unfortunately, these tools tend to come at quite a cost.

If you’re willing to pay for more detailed media coverage data, a couple of tools you might want to consider include Coverage Book (from $99 a month)

and Meltwater (bespoke pricing only).

4. Branded searches

The number of people searching for your brand online tells you a lot about how general awareness of your brand is changing. Sadly, tracking this used to be much easier than it is today. Before Google started hiding keyword data under “not provided,” monitoring branded searches was simple. You just had to look at your keyword data in the Google Analytics’ traffic report. While some of this data is still available, it’s in such small quantities that it’s far from a reliable data source.

The number of people searching for your brand tells a lot about how awareness changes, says @SujanPatel.
Click To Tweet

Thankfully there are still ways of measuring how searches for your brand are changing.

AdWords

Running a brand campaign on Google AdWords can reveal a lot about how many people are searching for your name online.

Some companies don’t like running branded campaigns because they’re paying for unnecessary clicks because their brand names should appear at the top of organic search results when someone searches for their company.

However, if the goal of a brand campaign is to quantify those searches, AdWords can work well.  On the plus side, branded search terms aren’t going to be competitive so they won’t be expensive.

Creating a brand campaign follows the same process as creating any other AdWords campaign. Just be sure to:

• Bid only on exact words or phrases
• Include keywords for as many variations of your brand name as possible

Once your campaign is running, the impressions data will show you how many people are searching for a variation of your brand name. You’ll then be able to track how this changes over time.

Keyword Planner

If you’ve only used Google’s Keyword Planner to find phrases to use in paid campaigns or on-page optimization, you’re missing a trick. Keyword Planner can also give you a good idea of how many people are searching for your brand name and how this changes over time.

Accessing this data is simple. From the front page of Keyword Planner, select “Get search volume data and trends” and enter your brand name in the box.

Then, verify that you’re collecting data from the correct country, and click “Get search volume.”

The accuracy of the results provided will, unfortunately, depend on whether you’re running campaigns with AdWords. If you’re not, you will see approximate results:

If this data is important to you, I suggest running a low-cost AdWords campaign purely to get access to more accurate data.

Keyword Planner also allows you to view how this data has changed over time. To view that, select the “Date Range” box on the left side of the page, turn the “Compare” button on, and select the dates you want to compare.

Google Trends

If you want to see at a glance how searches for your brand are changing over time, head over to Google Trends.

Enter your brand name in the search term box and change the filters as needed.

By far, the most useful filter is “All categories” – if you share your company name with other brands. This should increase the accuracy of the results by allowing you to narrow the results to searches for your brand name within your industry.

It’s worth noting that as useful as Google Trends is, it won’t reveal any data if your brand and the number of searches surrounding it are too small.

Conclusion

That’s four metrics that are well worth tracking if you want to understand how your content marketing is impacting general brand awareness. Are you tracking any metrics that I didn’t cover? It would be great if you could share what they are and how you track them in the comments.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Measurement is critical to understanding how your content marketing is (or is not) contributing to your goals. Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter or weekly digest for ongoing tips on measurement, tools to help, and more to make your content marketing even more relevant.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 4 Metrics to Track Impact of Content Marketing on Brand Awareness appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Michael Dauderstädt

Talking about inequality in Europe brings one face-to-face with a complex pattern of possible issues and dimensions, which can be measured in different ways. As Table 1 shows, inequality exists regarding different characteristics such as income, wealth or life expectancy between different entities such as persons, households, sexes, labour and capital, regions or countries. Economics and statistics provide various indicators to measure these inequalities and the choice of indicator is by no means value-free.

Table 1: Dimensions of inequality

This article focuses mainly on income inequality. But even if we focus on income inequality, caution is required, since income and prosperity, their development and distribution, point to many problems and pitfalls that also appear in Europe’s development, especially from an international point of view. Income is often defined as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita or as household income based on household surveys. In the EU that is the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC). The market income of households is much more unequally distributed than the disposable income, which includes transfers and social benefits while subtracting taxes. Household income can be further adjusted by taking into account household size (net equivalent income) or the non-monetary benefits resulting from public goods or services.

The three dimensions of European inequality

Inequality in Europe has three main dimensions: within member states, between member states and in the European Union (EU) altogether. Within member states, inequality has increased in most countries over the last decades. This is the well-known phenomenon that contributed to the rise of populism. Between member states, the analysis has to take into account the effects of changes in the exchange and inflation rates, too. Accordingly, when comparing real incomes, the use of purchasing power parities (PPP) makes more sense than a comparison at exchange rates.

The income per capita in PPP is usually higher in poorer member states than the one measured in exchange rates, since many things are cheaper there. Thus, inequality between countries is lower if measured at PPP. In the context of a catch-up process, when between-country inequality decreases and the income level of poorer member states comes closer to that of the richer ones, a real re-evaluation usually takes place, mostly accompanied by a nominal currency appreciation and/or a higher inflation rate, thus tending to reduce the difference between the purchasing power and the exchange rate.

Three concepts of Europe-wide inequality

Determining Europe-wide inequality requires analyzing the distribution of income within and between countries. Analogous to Branko Milanovic’s three concepts of inequality (see Figure 1) one can differentiate between three variants: international inequality, which disregards the different sizes of populations, (concept 1), population-weighted international inequality (concept 2) and true global inequality, which compares all people regardless of their nationality (concept 3).

Image Source

In order to measure concept 3 inequality for the EU, one has to consolidate all national SILC household survey data. A shorter approximation uses the S80/S20 ratio (see below) and constructs the quintiles of the EU population using the appropriate national quintiles (for example Dauderstädt/Keltek). EU-wide inequality is determined by the gap between poorer and richer member states and the inequality within member states. The level of inequality increases from concept 1 to concept 3.

Measuring inequality depends on distributional preferences

In order to measure the distribution of income, one can use a variety of indicators (see last column of Table 1). The Gini ranges between Zero (equal distribution) and 1 (or 100), when one person gets all the income. The Theil is useful because it can be decomposed between inequality between and within member states. The S80/S20 ratio is the relation between the income of the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. The Chilean economist Palma has introduced a similar ratio of the relation between the top 10 percent and the bottom 40 percent as he had observed that the share of the middle 50 percent remains relatively constant while overall inequality varies dramatically.

While these latter indicators measure relative inequality, others such as standard deviation look at absolute inequality. The picture of the development of inequality can appear quite different depending on the use of indicator. When lower incomes grow faster than higher incomes (economists call that “beta convergence”), the distance between the lower and higher incomes can still continue to grow for a while (depending on the original relationship). In this case, the standard deviation increases, too (so no “sigma convergence” in economists’ terminology). Thus, the use of an indicator involves moral and political preferences: Are you more concerned with the absolute difference between income levels or their relative ratio?

This is the first in a series of articles on inequality in Europe co-sponsored by the Hans Böckler Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Social Europe

By Mars Dorian, {grow} Contributing Columnist

A few weeks ago, a disgruntled online biz owner shared his frustrations with me. As a German, he wanted to expand his services to the American market and faced difficulties dealing with US clients via email. He blamed “cultural differences,” I told him to stop crying and ordered him to get better at “reading” emails. Not reading emails like a toddler reads, but understanding the nuances between the lines and realizing the true intent and needs of the client’s message.

Today, I want to reveal my top three tips that will help you turn client email into new business value.  No Jedi Academy training required.

1) Never ‘react’ to an email

I love writing sci-fi stories and selling them on Amazon. For the past three books, I’ve hired a Canadian editor who specializes in sci-fantasy editing. Our working relationship has been fruitful. She’s fast, effective, and knows the differences between firing modes on futuristic assault rifles. Double-whammo.

But when I received the edits of my newest manuscript and proofread it, I found many mistakes … up to five per chapter, which made me question the thoroughness of her work.

I confronted her, showcasing the many mistakes I had found. She replied using curse words and exclamation marks, telling me how the file was corrupted and how she was going to spend an entire holiday weekend to fix it. She apologized but I felt anger burning up my veins. I had aimed for a tight publishing schedule which she agreed on. Now the work was postponed at least two more weeks.

Roar.

I wanted to write a mail with burning fingers and tell her how disappointed I was. My brain made up stories about how she didn’t respect my time and money. But then I held still and read her email again. And again. The unusual amount of exclamation marks and cursing of her message let me realize she was distraught. She deeply cared about her work and was probably disappointed about her file errors.

So instead of going all green Hulk SMASH on her, I told her to relax and enjoy the Easter weekend. I told her to focus on the re-edits with a rejuvenated mind. She called me an ‘angel’ and thanked me for understanding. Our professional relationship improved with one little empathetic email.

Lesson: Never react from an emotionally compromised state. Re-read your client’s email and find a constructive way to deal with any problem. The short-term joy of penning a self-righteous mail will ALWAYS hurt you in the long-term.

2) When your client doesn’t reply, it’s likely your fault

During my online creative career, I’d received various requests from potential clients RAVING about my work. Those soon-to-be-clients often flooded me with compliments, telling me how “colorful and edgy” my drawings looked and how they’d love working with me. My passion leveled up to over 9000!

Well, when I wrote back and showcased my rates and working style, the passion died as no answer returned. Silence echoed through my inbox.

I would wait for days, sometimes up to two weeks while wondering what had happened. Even email updates wouldn’t elicit an answer, so I asked a friend in online marketing. He told me the potential client was probably confused and unsure. He told me to approach the client and eliminate worries, so I wrote:

Hey (client name),

Tell me more about your budget and what works best for you. If there’s something unclear, feel free to ask me. I’m a pretty approachable guy

Mars

Simplistic, but effective. A short statement like the one above almost always triggered an answer. The client would usually reply within 24 hours and say, “Yeah, sorry, I don’t have the budget for that. Could we just do this X or that Y?”

Or they’d say they didn’t understand my working procedure and waited for me to send the first samples of the work.

A simple reassuring mail was all it took to revive a zombie deal.

Why?

We don’t like to reject people. It feels impolite and embarrassing. So when we’re dealt with an email that confuses us or states different ideas, it’s easy to just stop replying instead of saying “I don’t agree” or “I can’t do that”, especially if we don’t know the person on the other side of the computer. When you, the service provider, offer assistance and clarification, the (potential) client knows they’re in safe hands. They feel comfortable to re-engage.

3) Matching your tone to your client

Peak performance coach Tony Robbins once said in order to build rapport, you should match your attitude to your partner. So when you’re speaking to a calm person who talks in a soothing voice and you flail your arms while babbling words at the speed of bullets, disconnection happen. You’re literally riding on a different wavelength.

Back in the dark ages of 2009, I used to reply to all commission requests in the same way, regardless of the writing style of the client. Urgh. Of course, that behavior resulted in hit-and-miss responses. You could say I failed to accommodate my clients’ needs.

Thankfully, after endless online marketing Hipster-cafe meet-ups with my biz friends, I learned. I adapted to my environment like the xenomorph from Aliens.

Now, I always analyze the writing style of my requests. When the client is more inclined to use curse words and wild language, I match that in my replies. If the client uses formal language, my answers become more sophisticated. Some people call that behavior ‘selling out’, but as long as my moral values are not compromised, I can express a wide range of communication styles.

We talk differently to children, spouses, and parents. So why wouldn’t I talk differently to a comic-geek than to a business lawyer even though they both request my artistic services? It’s all about matching your tone.

Conclusion
One of the best online business skills is to learn ‘reading’ your clients’ emails. Not reading in the traditional sense, but seeing the nuances between the lines, finding the true intent and crafting a reply that matches your client email’s tone. It’s an art, but if you follow the 3 tips from above, you’re closer to becoming a ‘Reply Picasso’.

What’s your number one tip on extracting knowledge from your client emails?

Mars Dorian is an illustrating designer and storyteller. He crafts words and pictures that help clients stand out online and reach their customers. You can find his homebase at http://www.marsdorian.com and connect with him on Twitter @marsdorian

The post Three ways to turn client email into new business value appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

Comments

• Hey Wael, I've written the post of a freelancer/small business ... by Mars Dorian
• Mr. Dorian, Thank you for the great article, but i have a ... by Wael Tinawi
• Thanks, Jennifer. I nowadays always try to be conscious while ... by Mars Dorian
• Thank you Mars! What a great post! I am in sales and chair a ... by Jennifer Porter

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Charisma is hard to define -- but when someone has charisma, it’s obvious. Charismatic salespeople have a significant advantage over their competition, since prospects are far likelier to engage with them, respect their guidance, and listen to their pitch.

One of the simplest ways to become more charismatic is changing your vocabulary. The following phrases are are powerful in isolation; use them together, and their effects will be even stronger.

Click here to jump straight to the infographic version we created with 24Slides.

1. “Tell me more.”

Traditional sales calls can feel like interrogations if you’re not careful. Charismatic salespeople avoid this issue by responding to their prospects with phrases like:

• “Tell me more.”
• “I see.”
• “Go on.”

These simple, neutral replies show the rep is listening and encourages the buyer to open up. They also avoid prompting the buyer to give a certain response, unlike leading questions such as, “Do you think that strategy is working?”

2. “It’s like … ”; “It’s as though … ”

There’s a reason writers rely on similes, metaphors, and analogies: These devices make your pitch more memorable and engaging.

See the difference:

Before: “Our tool helps you find and connect with passive candidates approximately three months before they start looking for a job.”

After: “Our tool helps you find and connect with passive candidates approximately three months before they start looking for a job. It’s like you’re starting a marathon an hour before the next racer.”

Coming up with a great figure of speech on the spot is hard to do, so once you find some that work, keep using them.

3. “No”; “yes”

Charisma and confidence go hand-in-hand. Next time you’re answering a close-ended question, fight the urge to over-explain: Simply saying “yes” or “no” will make you seem far more sure of yourself.

If your prospect wants more information, they’ll request it. This subtly puts you in a position of power. Furthermore, you’ll avoid rambling -- which tends to lessen your charisma.

Here’s an example of this tactic:

Prospect: “Do you service the Midwest?”

Rep: “Yes.”

Prospect: “Great, how many distribution centers do you have in the region?”

Rep: “Three.”

4. “One of my customers … ”

Storytelling and charisma go hand-in-hand. People are usually most spell-bound when they’re absorbing a story, whether it’s a TV show, podcast, movie, play, book, or speech.

That’s why customer case studies have enormous power in the sales process. Use them to bring the value of your product to life for your prospects and show them how similar they are to its current users.

Narratives from your personal experience can also amp up your charisma (although be careful to maintain professionalism).

For example, if the buyer is struggling with his business’s payroll system, you might tell a humorous story about the time your former company’s system crashed right before taxes were due.

Not only will you win credibility, you’ll liven up the call.

5. “I’m excited about … ”

Charismatic people show their emotions “spontaneously and genuinely,” according to Ronald E. Riggio, author of "The Charisma Quotient: What It Is, How to Get It, How to Use It."

Others naturally pick up on those feelings, which makes them feel closer to the charismatic person and more comfortable expressing their own feelings.

With that in mind, share your emotions -- both positive and negative. When you’re enthusiastic about an opportunity for the buyer, say, “I’m excited about the chance you have to do X … ”

And when they give you a dismaying piece of news, say, “I’m disappointed to hear Y … ” or “It upsets me that … ”

Just make sure you don’t go too far: If you’re always mentioning how you feel or claiming to feel things you don’t, you’ll come across as unprofessional or inauthentic.

6. “To recap … ”

Repetition is a powerful device. Unsurprisingly, people better remember information the more often they hear it. Less intuitively, they’re also likelier to believe it.

If you have a specific fact or argument you really want to drive home, try saying it at the beginning and end of your sales call.

To give you an idea, you might say at the start: “The right Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will improve virtually every aspect of your hiring results.”

You’d end the call with, “To recap, implementing an ATS will improve your company’s hiring efforts across the board.”

7. “Imagine … ”

Charismatic salespeople use hypothetical situations -- especially ones that place the buyer front-and-center -- to captivate and convince their audience.

For instance, a rep might ask her prospect to imagine a world where she meets her objectives in half the time. He’ll immediately want to reach this future state -- making him more receptive to her pitch.

“Suppose,” “pretend,” “what if … ”and “envision” are also strong options for creating a vision in the buyer’s mind.

8. “Great question, I’m glad you asked.”

A rep with lots of charisma typically welcomes her prospects’ questions. She knows the safer the buyer feels asking for information or clarifying a detail, the likelier he is to trust her.

As an added benefit, this response subtly boosts her prospect’s ego. Who doesn’t like coming up with an insightful question?

Language is a powerful too -- and it's crucial salespeople learn how to use phrases that establish their credibility and authority instantly. Add a few of these to your daily calls and meetings and see what they can do for you.

Podcast listening continues to grow in the United States (see my post here with the latest 2017 numbers). As a consequence of this increasingly popularity, new podcasts are being launched at a feverish rate. According to Libysn (the largest host of podcasts, including several of our shows here at Convince & Convert), they are serving up more than 6,000 new shows each year. That’s nearly 20 new podcasts launched every DAY, just on Libsyn.

That’s a lot of audio.

And it’s a lot of audio concentrated on top-of-the-funnel “thought leadership.” In fact, I’d argue that the overwhelming majority of podcasts in the business category are just that: Mechanisms to make their hosts and sponsors better-known, and an opportunity to build relationships with interesting guests.

That was certainly the impetus for my Social Pros podcast, which has won many awards and is now approaching its 300th episode. I started it with Eric Boggs under a simple premise: “What if I could interview our future consulting clients?”

Most business podcasts are similarly conceived, but increasingly I’m seeing podcasts that also target a more specific, mid-funnel, or late-funnel audience. This is podcasting in place of (or as an augmentation to) traditional low-funnel content marketing like webinars, ebooks, and detailed YouTube videos.

Here’s how podcasts can apply at every stage of the consideration funnel.

Top of the Funnel Podcasts

These shows (like my Social Pros podcast) seek to grow notoriety for the hosts, and build early-stage connections with potential clients.

For example, The Project Podcast is a show about how companies decide to relocate. Convince & Convert Media helped conceive and launch the show, and it stars and is managed by our friends at DCI, a public relations firm that specializes in economic development and tourism.

The Project Podcast is a terrific way for DCI to get on the radar of more potential clients in economic development. It’s the classic, top-of-the-funnel approach to podcasting value.

Middle of the Funnel Podcasts

Just two weeks ago, my daughter was deciding where to go to college in the fall. She narrowed it down to two choices, including Santa Clara University.

Wisely, Santa Clara launched a new podcast called Life Invented, that interviews admissions counselors and current Santa Clara students about how and why people go to school there, and what the experience is like.

The team at Santa Clara emailed links to the show to all admitted students and their parents. This is a VERY smart move. We carefully listened to every episode and learned a lot about Santa Clara.

I just love this idea. It got me thinking about a whole bunch of other ways to use audio and podcasting to engage with prospects whose information you’ve already gathered.

There’s tremendous potential for HR too. Think about a podcast that is sent to new employees after they are hired, but before they start work. I can’t wait to work on this for corporate clients.

Bottom of the Funnel Podcasts

One of our favorite clients is Insight, a Fortune 500 supplier of B2B and IT technology and services.

We worked with them to invent a podcast about digital transformation and trends. It’s called Technomics, and it targets current Insight customers and employees. Our team at Convince & Convert Media produces every episode (it stars Insight personnel on the mic).

Each season has a theme that ties the episodes together. The current shows in season three focus on technology infrastructure optimization.

Podcasts like Technomics are never going to have enormous audiences, but that’s not the point. What we’re doing with this show is delivering rich content to a known, high-value audience. This kind of bottom-of-the-funnel podcast is also very useful as a sales enablement tool, with the Insight sales team able to direct customers to specific, hyper-relevant episodes of the show.

When you stop thinking of podcasts solely as a way to garner a big audience, you find many more strategically precise ways to use audio content.

How could you use mid-funnel or bottom-funnel podcasts in your own organization? If we can help you, let us know. We’d love to work on something with you.

How much time do you spend on emails every week? If you’re average, it’s about 28% of your time ‒ almost one and a half days out of every week.

So … how much of that time do you think is wasted?

It might be a tough thing to consider, but, by some estimates, six percent of our total working time is wasted, simply because we have to wade through murky writing.

Now, not all of that reading time may be in your inbox. But a lot of it is. And email reading is particularly slow and difficult. That’s because we’re usually required to do something with the messages we receive. Answer them – delete them – file them – forward them. Or just let them sit there, taking up space, until we finally get enough clarity to know which one of those actions to take.

It all uses up a lot of time. Not to mention thinking energy that could be used for better things.

The tidal wave of email isn’t going to stop any time soon, but if we want to be better heard above its roar, we’d do well to learn how to craft more effective emails.

This isn’t just for copywriters or marketers. If you do anything in a modern office, you probably use email quite a lot. You get a lot of emails, and you send a lot of emails.

So what if you could get more results from the emails you sent? More “yeses” to your requests? Faster decisions from your bosses?

It would make your job a lot easier, right?

That’s what I want to show you how to do. And it won’t take very long. A clear path to more effective emails is at your fingertips.

1. Get your subject line right.

We’ve written about how headlines can make or break a piece of content. Well, subject lines can make or break an email. Depending on which study you look at, up to a third of consumers either will or won’t open an email based solely on the subject line.

Writing subject lines is, of course, an art. A lot of research has been conducted on which words, phrases, or approaches work best.

One recent study from Marketing Sherpa showed that personalized subject lines often get a lift.

You can also test your subject lines. Tools like the free Subjectline.com or the paid tool, Touchstone, can help. There’s also Adestra’s free tool for subject lines, which will tell you how an individual word in a subject line might affect your email’s performance.

For much more information on the art of the subject line, see our ebook, “12 Tips for Amazingly Effective Email Subject Lines.”

2. Keep it short.

Unless you’re publishing a long-form e-zine-type of newsletter (something like The Hustle), keep your emails short.

As short as possible. This applies to interoffice emails, outreach emails, sales emails, and even to promotional and company announcement emails.

Why keep things short? Because:

• People don’t read online. They scan. And if they scan on web pages, they scan in their inboxes even more.
• Nobody wants to spend a second longer in their inbox than they have to.
• Most emails won’t be looked at for more than 20 to 30 seconds, max. And about half of them will only be viewed for 15 seconds or less.

So how short should emails be? The research says that an optimal length is 50 to 125 words.

To give you an idea of what that might look like, here’s a content promotion email from Neil Patel. It’s 104 words:

Notice a couple of things about this:

• It’s got four links. Three of them go to the same page ‒ the new blog post he’s announcing.
• Each of those three links has different language. This makes you more likely to click, because there are three options for framing the content.
• Most of the paragraphs here are only one line long. Even the long paragraph is only three lines.
• That postscript: It goes to a business opt-in. So he’s promoting content here, but also nudging the people who are interested into his sales funnel.
• The postscript is an old-school copywriting trick. People tend to read postscripts far more often than the body of a sales letter. So try using more postscripts in your emails (especially if they are covert calls to action) and see if you don’t get better results.

Here’s a sales follow-up email that’s also short and sweet. It’s also 104 words:

A couple of things about this one:

• It’s personalized both at the greeting and at the close.
• Notice all those short, easy-to-read paragraphs.
• It’s written in a conversational tone. This email sounds like a real person would sound.
• It’s offering me something of value, but also something that I’d expressed an interest in.
• It’s the follow-up from a webinar I attended. You’re sending follow-ups after someone downloads content or signs up for something, right?
• The signature lines tell me a lot about who he is. They also give me a way to look into other things he offers. This is a bit of a softer sell than Neil’s postscript, but it’s quietly doing a similar thing.

Compare those two emails with one that’s 226 words long. Even this is a relatively short email, but those extra 100 words don’t really add much. This is an email that should have been 100 words, not 226.

A couple things of note here:

• The author of this email is trying to appeal to my ego. I’m certainly vulnerable to that approach, but it’s done here in a rather pandering way.
• It’s got several punctuation mistakes in it. They hurt the writer’s credibility. Badly.
• She could have cut the paragraphs that begin with, “Pam, It (sic) was a really great article” and “Now I’m sure.”

One of the things she does do very well here, however, is to ask for feedback. Joanna Wiebe has an excellent series of tutorials on copywriting, one of which is about writing cold emails like this. In it she recommends asking the influencer what the one thing they’d change or add to the piece would be. That very focused and simple request often gets a response.

Want to get better at writing shorter emails? The Chrome extension TinyMails can help by giving you immediate feedback. It counts the words in your emails and calculates how long they’ll take to read.

3. Keep it clear.

The best measurement of your writing’s clarity is the grade level it’s written at. We’ve previously noted how important readability is. But with emails, it’s even more important. So, while your onsite content might be okay at a 7^th-grade-reading level, consider writing your emails at a 3^rd-grade level.

Is that crazy? Nope. Research from Boomerang actually proves that sales emails written at a 3^rd-grade-reading level get the highest response rate.

Now, does this mean you have to distill your messaging down to “Bob ran fast. See Bob run.”? Nope. It does mean that you’ll need to talk to people without using jargon. And without meandering sentences or murky thinking. You can write about complex things with simple words. It just takes work – and skill. (Ask Hemingway.)

4. Personalize the email.

We touched on this in two earlier points, but I wanted to give personalizing emails their own moment.

Personalization works. Period. You saw how a personalized subject line can lift open and click-through rates. Then you saw how a personalized greeting, combined with a personalized close, can make a good email stronger and more convincing.

And that’s all true and good.

But it’s also important to acknowledge a different kind of “personalization” ‒ sending the right message to the right customer (or influencer, or prospect, or co-worker) at the right time.

This is the kind of personalization that’s more effective than just dropping somebody’s first name in.

It’s also far harder … but it gets much better results.

So when you’re sending out emails to people (for requests, or sales contacts, or whatever), don’t just use the same copy over and over again. Customize it based on the receiver. Take a look at their website to get the gist of what they do and who they are. Then write an email that acknowledges that.

I get far too many emails (I bet you do, too) from people who say things that make it vividly clear they have no idea who I am or what I do. And you know what? I don’t answer those emails.

I bet most of the other people they’re sending these emails to don’t answer them, either. I bet they get pretty awful response rates.

I also bet that if they sent out even a third as many emails ‒ but actually checked who they were mailing to and wrote emails that made sense and showed five minutes of research – that they’d get more results. Fewer emails, same amount of time … but emails that actually connect with their targets and show that the sender wasn’t just cranking out a template with people’s first names stuffed in. That’s not too much to ask.

5. Close strong.

How do you sign off on your emails? With “Best Regards”? “Yours”?

I usually mirror back what the other author wrote. So if they close with “Best Regards,” I will, too.

But maybe I need to try a different tack.

According to other research from Boomerang, “Emails that closed with a variation of thank you got significantly more responses than emails ending with other popular closings.”

Here’s the count for what they found:

Geez … Mom was right. Saying “thank you” really does make a difference. And in a statistically valid way!

Conclusion

Email isn’t going anywhere. It will be the primary way we communicate in business for quite some time. And while managing email and writing emails are certainly frustrating and time-consuming tasks, they are also necessary.

So it’s worth focusing a little effort on making our own emails better. It might just get us ahead, too. And who knows, maybe – inspired by everyone else’s better emails – more of our peers will start sending better emails, too.

Back to you

Got any tips for how to write better emails? Share your wisdom in the comments.

Companies used to embrace the idea of showering top performers with praise and rewards as a way to boost productivity. The general thinking was that since these employees want to be here, they will work harder with less encouragement. However it can become difficult to encourage incentive goals for employees who are so aware of their above average status.

But this is not really a problem in the big picture. Top performers are your bread and butter, and they earn that status by consistently performing and reaching goals in the first place. There is quite simply too little room for improvement. Modern wisdom tells us that the most lucrative strategy with incentives is to target the “middle” performers in your organization.

Magic of the Middle

According to a Sales Executive Council (SEC) report, a five percent performance gain from your “middle” group yields 70 percent more revenue on average than it would from your top performers. Why? Apart from your top and bottom employees, the middle “average” performing employees have a dependable willingness to work combined with adequate room for improvement – magic ingredients for any incentive program.

Double that, the “middle” group are typically the largest and diverse cohort in any workforce, and focusing too much on high performers can engender resentment and smack of elitism. Top performers tend to get recognized quite a bit; middle performers tend to have smaller accomplishments overlooked. Ergo these programs should focus on those employees with the best potential, rather than the best track record.

Get in the Game

Incentives are effective because they turn workplace goals into games, making them more fun. But when you tell a top performer he/she will get rewarded for doing what they normally do, it ceases to become a game. When you pressure a bottom performer to quickly improve to the level of their top-performing peers, it ceases to become fun. Like anything else, balance is the key. Aligning your programs to move the middle does not mean you forget the other segments of employees; it is merely the method that raises the least amount of question marks for effectiveness.

Make sure your incentive programs effectively reach, engage, and move the middle in your organization. Here are five best-practice tips to help:

1. Set challenging yet achievable goals. Bonuses and cash rewards can only motivate so far, so don’t rely on them to move the big strategic metrics in your organization. As a general rule, variable pay incentives are much more effective when deployed among smaller groups and aligned toward smaller, more achievable goals. Their combined effects can give you a considerable edge toward your most challenging goals but may never satisfy them fully on their own.
2. Enable employees to revel in success. The spoils of success don’t stop with the cash bonus. Just as important to your employees is the prestige and in-group infamy that goes along with winning short-term incentives (remember middle employees may not usually get these moments of pride). Giving them a leaderboard or some way to publicly acknowledge top performers is a great way to add intrinsic value to any program, and can keep them satisfied long after the extra compensation loses its luster.
3. Provide transparency. Many middle employees who participate in incentive programs (frontline call center/sales positions, etc.) have little to no insight into how winning their small contest will matter to the organization as a whole. Fill in those gaps as much as you can with transparency – show them how their efforts are affecting the bottom line and keep them updated as if they were owners. The sense of ownership adds deep intrinsic value and looks very good on management to boot.
4. Be objective in your assessments. It cannot be stressed enough to have a data-driven approach to incentives. Do not leave the assessment of goals up to the opinions of a manager or executive; they are likely to favor high performers. Incentives must start with measurable results in mind and their results must stand up to scrutiny when the money is being handed out, or it will only sow resentment for the winners. It is always a huge motivational boost to show your teams due diligence and a level playing field during incentives and contests.
5. Balance other forms of recognition. With every incentive-based contest there are winners and losers, and much care must be taken in ensuring the losers don’t feel left behind, or worse, useless. This is where an existing daily recognition platform can come in handy. Balance your experience with daily recognition, extra reward opportunities, and by cultivating a supportive culture beyond the confines of your incentive programs. Encourage frontline managers to be more engaging and develop real relationships based on mutual respect. When your employees live inside a whole culture of winning, losing never seems so bad.

Have Fun

There is no doubt that cash-based incentives and bonuses are all-around enticing, but much care must be taken in making sure you are not just creating more disparity between high, middle, and low performers. By remaining objective and transparent, communicating clearly to employees, giving them a stake in the company success, and balancing incentives with supplemental recognition, you can make incentives that move the middle without leaving anyone else out of the fun.

Walking away is hard, especially when it comes to potential deals. After all, you've spent time, energy, and resources building a relationship — and giving up means you have nothing to show for it.

But in the long run, having a pulse on when to walk away and disqualify leads will help you refine your efforts and make you a much more efficient, effective salesperson. Every minute you spend on an impossible or low-value deal is one you could be spending on a viable, valuable one.

And even if you manage to convince a poor-fit prospect to buy, you're setting yourself up for an unhappy customer relationship and a potential hit to your reputation. To avoid the pitfalls of bad-fit prospects, look out for these seven signs you should give up on a deal.

7 Signs You Should Walk Away From a Prospect

1. They can’t answer these three questions.

Sales requires some detective skills. You need to uncover your prospect’s pain, figure out what they mean (versus what they say), and tailor your messaging to their priorities — but you can't do all the work.

According to Colleen Francis, author of “Nonstop Sales Boom,” sales reps should walk away from prospects who can’t answer these three questions:

• What does success look like with this project?
• Who else will be involved in this decision?
• When do you need to have this project done?

If the prospect says, "I don’t know" to any of those questions, they're either not serious or not a decision-maker. If it's the latter, you don't necessarily have to jump ship. Somewhere during the approval process, the real decision-maker will ask them those same questions. Without a satisfactory response, the deal won’t move forward.

Before you give up, try saying, “I’m worried that unless we can figure out what you’re hoping to accomplish — and by when — this might not be the best investment of your time. Should we table this conversation?”

2. They (really) don't have the budget.

Sales reps are used to hearing “We don’t have the budget,” and “I can’t afford that price.” But that shouldn’t be your cue to give up — many prospects use price as a convenient excuse to get off the phone.

That said, some companies actually won't be able to afford your product. You can hash out whether that's the case through a bit more discovery. Ask questions like:

• What’s your prospect’s company’s revenue?
• Is accessing cash a matter of proving the purchase’s value to higher-ups or hoping that a new round of funding comes in?
• If you changed billing terms or offered a slight discount, would that change things?
• Do you typically sell to companies of this size with this approximate revenue?

If your prospect’s answers are completely misaligned with what you’re able to provide, you’re probably out of this prospect’s price range. Rather than abandoning the deal with no warning, let your prospect down gently by saying, "Given what you’ve told me about your budget, I don’t believe our product is the right fit for you."

Score some sales karma by adding, "I’d recommend [Company A] or [Company B] — either should be able to meet your needs within the budget you’ve outlined."

Now you’ve created some goodwill, it’s a great time to request a referral. Say, "Do you know anyone who’s looking for a more robust solution?"

3. You're competing with three or more vendors.

Given your line of work, you probably enjoy a little competition. But as sales expert Jeff Hoffman explains, pursuing a sale when there are three or more other vendors in the mix isn’t usually worth it.

Not only do your chances of closing decrease with every direct competitor, Hoffman says, but the fact that you’re facing so many other vendors also suggests the deal’s still in early stages. You’ll likely be working with a lower-level employee, rather than the decision-maker.

And even if you turn down an RFP, that doesn’t mean the opportunity is lost.

"If your company was a serious contender, the manager will tell the researcher to go back to your company and ask again," Hoffman notes. "If you receive a second request, you will know the prospect is truly interested, and you aren’t wasting your time by getting involved."

4. They go dark.

Sometimes, your prospect will seem to fall off the face of the planet out of nowhere. They stop returning your calls, answering your emails, or responding to your LinkedIn messages. Eventually, you start digging into your bag of last resort re-engagement techniques — and still, zilch.

That's a good sign that you should probably stop trying. Sure, there's a chance they'll respond to that tenth email or eleventh voicemail — but let's be real, the odds are pretty slim. Plus, when you refuse to recognize prospects who aren't interested, you end up with a cluttered pipeline and inaccurate forecasts.

That said, never end a relationship by going dark yourself. Wrap it up professionally by sending a breakup email. Bryan Kreuzberger, founder of Breakthrough Email, says sending a “permission to close your file” email gives reps a chance to learn from the sale. (Check out the template he uses that gets a 76% response rate!)

5. You’re working with a coach — not a champion.

Your prospect is picking up the phone and putting your meetings on their calendar, so life is good, right? Not necessarily. Simply talking to you isn’t enough — the prospect needs to be able to move the deal forward.

If a prospect is unable to introduce you to other stakeholders, talk about their budget, share their decision criteria, or answer your questions about their needs, desires, and pain points, they're likely a coach — someone who can be valuable in providing context around his company’s internal politics and decision-making processes without the authority or influence to impact a deal.

When you run into this contact, you don’t need to abandon the account. You just need to find a champion — someone with access to the decision-maker who will sell your product internally.

You don’t want to burn bridges with your coach, so don’t insinuate that they’re not useful to you. Instead, keep things positive and ask that point of contact who (besides them) should be involved in the conversations. They’ll point you to the people who can actually ink a deal.

6. They don't see your value.

It's the salesperson's responsibility to educate the buyer on their solution's value. If your prospect is struggling to understand why they need your product and how it will help them achieve their goals, reframe your value proposition, show them customer case studies, send them testimonials from your happiest clients, and so on.

But if you've repeatedly attempted and failed to convince them of your offering's ROI, it's time to call it quits. Some buyers will never grasp the message — and you'll simply waste your breath if you keep trying.

While they might end up buying, you'll have a difficult (if not impossible) time negotiating a fair price. After all, they see your product as a commodity — not a necessity.

7. It’s flat-out not a good fit.

If your product won’t help the prospect, you’re obligated to walk away. At the end of the day, your mission shouldn’t be closing — it should be delivering the best solution to your customers.

Imagine you sell online reputation management services to restaurants. Because your product isn’t really cost-effective for smaller organizations, you target dining establishments with 20 or more locations. You get an inbound lead for a restaurant with only two locations; after following up, you realize this business will get minimal ROI from your services — if any.

Rather than pushing forward with the sale, you should say, "From what I’ve learned about your restaurant and goals, I don’t believe our product is the best solution. I recommend [alternate product #1] or [alternate product #2] instead, because [reasons A and B]."

This response boosts your reputation as credible and trustworthy — so when the prospect’s restaurant chain gets acquired by a much bigger one, you’ll be the first person they call. But even if this prospect never becomes a good fit, they'll likely pass your name along to anyone who is.

Removing a prospect from your pipeline never feels good — even when you know it’s the best thing to do. But there’s a major upside. When you walk away from the prospects who aren’t right for your business, you’ll be able to focus on the prospects who are.

The idea that not all employees contribute to revenue is an outdated one. In fact, the impact of non-quota carrying employees on the sales process has never been more important? Why? Because of social media and the network effects and digital word of mouth advantages that come with it.

As a result of social networks, prospective customers are now in the same spots online as many of your non-customer facing co-workers. They’re on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. Sometimes they’re in the same Facebook/LinkedIn Groups or may even know them from previous jobs, schools or experiences. In fact, Facebook alone has reduced the degrees of separation from 6 to 5 degrees. Therefore because of social networks, we’re at least 1 or more degrees closer to everyone on earth.

Companies that wish to succeed in the modern era have to think like this, and have to start seeing their entire employee base as part of an overarching Revenue Team – whereby non-quota carriers get measured and rewarded for certain revenue contributing KPIs.

Here are a few ways that non-quota carriers are affecting the bottom line:

The Importance of Micro-Influencers

1. Micro-influencers – usually between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.
2. They fly under the radar but individually have a lot of influence. Sad companies don’t even know who these people are.
3. They’ve developed a niche group which is highly engaged
4. These people are usually not quota carrying and should be prioritized to be sharing/engaging online.

The Value From a Social Footprint Across the Organization Goes Beyond Sales

1. Each individual (whether they are quota carrying or not) has a voice (or potential voice) on Social.
2. Rather than just the brand shouting the message or just the quota sales people shouting the message. Non-quota carrying employees (of any department) can provide the authentic balance a brand needs online to be likable and transparent.
3. The executive team being engaged and active in influencing buyers. selling. They Build relationships and represent the brand and offer credibility to sales reps.
4. All employees want to get involved in Social Enablement and be a part of the success of the organization. Capitalize on that.

Influence on the Sales Process Goes Beyond Quota Carriers

1. As content sharers they play an active role in seeding content online for buyers to find and get influenced b­y. Leave content breadcrumbs for people to find and follow.
2. Modern B2B enterprise buyers read on avg 11 pieces of content during their decision/sales process
3. The more people in company sharing content the more likelihood buyers (or those influencing the buying committee) will be reading about you and not your competitor
4. Can measure through campaign impact (increased reach/ engagement/ amplification (internal shares)/clicks. Can also be measured through presence by using approved social profiles or LinkedIn’s SSI score.

“One difference between the Top 10% and the Top 1% is the very top are extremely efficient with their time.” — Jason Lemkin, SaaStr

Ever struggle to turn inspiration into action?

Think about the last time you felt inspired after meeting with your manager, listening to a presentation at a conference, listening to a sales podcast or watching a motivational video on YouTube or Facebook. Whatever the catalyst, the inspiration rushed into your body and the adrenaline started pumping.

What happened next?

In all likelihood, you grabbed a cup of caffeine, put in some headphones and felt ready to seize the day. Maybe you picked up the phone and called a prospect, opened your sales CRM and followed up with a lead or even began prospecting on LinkedIn.

Your productivity was at an all-time high.

But that burst of productivity was likely short-lived. The next day, things went back to normal and you spent more time browsing Facebook and talking about sports than you did talking to leads.

Why?

Because the truth is most sales professionals struggle with productivity.

Nowhere is this struggle more real than in an industry where you’re frequently told “no,” hung up on or just plain ignored, even when you’re genuinely trying to help. I’ve spoken with tons of sales executives, managers and entrepreneurs who point to a lack of productivity as the reason their sales reps are struggling. And that’s why I’ve put together this list of bad habits that sales reps should avoid at all costs. Nix these habits, and I bet you’ll reclaim some of that lost productivity. 

(Staying productive is even easier with the right sales tools. Try Close.io for free—no credit card required.) 

1. Letting others control your calendar

Time is a terrible thing to waste.

Unfortunately, that’s not a statement everyone in sales would actually agree with. In your career, you’re going to meet a lot of people who like to waste time. (Because, let’s face it—some days, wasting time sounds a lot more appealing than making cold calls. If it then takes you 16 clicks to log each call, like the inside sales team of Foursquare used to before moving over to Close.io, that makes things even worse.)

If you cherish your time, you want to ensure that your time is spent doing the things that matter most to you.

That means taking control of your calendar. Don’t be afraid to tell a colleague that you can’t meet right before a call. Don’t be afraid to tell a prospect that the time they proposed won’t work. Take control of your calendar to increase your ability to deliver.

2. Procrastinating on your to-do list

One of the most effective ways to stay on task is to keep track of the things you want to accomplish each day. But many sales reps put off their to-do lists until the last few hours of the day and attempt to cram everything into one quick burst.

Instead of procrastinating on your to-do list, tackle the hardest tasks on your list as soon as your workday starts. Using this approach, you’ll have a big win under your belt early and won’t be able to call the workday a waste.

3. Overthinking your relationships

Thinking about where you stand in a relationship with a prospect is a good thing. Thinking about the psychology of how you approach a lead that has gone cold is a good thing. But obsessing over these little details for hours upon hours will do nothing but drive you crazy.

Relationships are complex—so complex that you could spend months analyzing and thinking about every word, email, intro and demo. A great way to mediate this bad habit is to focus on the things you can do today. Don’t spend countless hours wondering if things could have gone differently; take steps today that will help you get closer to your goal.  

4. Saying “yes” to everything

As our own Steli Efti once put it: “Yes” is lazy. Learn to say “no.”

I know it’s tough, because in sales, we like to please people.

We like to make clients, prospects, leads and our managers happy. But sometimes trying to make everyone happy ends up causing more problems and stress and reducing our productivity as a result. Sales reps too often say “yes” to everything and end up overcommitting to features, timelines, new projects and meeting requests.

The obsession with “yes” needs to stop.

Learn to love the NO.

5. Waiting for inspiration to find you

The sales reps who sit back and wait for the “right moment” or refuse to get moving until they “get in the zone” are the sales reps who struggle to break into the top 10%. Rather than sit around and wait for inspiration (which rarely strikes out of the blue—you have to go looking for it), the best sales reps have a process in place that requires action, whether or not they’re “feeling it” right then.

We’ve baked that right into our sales software. With Inbox, you have a unified workspace for all your sales-related activities, so you’ll never have to wonder “What should I do next?”

How do you start your morning? How do you make sure you’re on the right track? How do you monitor your own output over the course of the week?

If you don't have an answer for these questions, you’re likely winging it. And the best sales reps don’t wing it. Instead, they have a work routine they can rely on to start the day productively and end the day knowing they did everything possible to make the day count.

6. Letting emails and texts disrupt your flow

Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzzzzz.

That’s the sound of your phone vibrating in your pocket. Do you reach for it in the middle of writing an email to a prospect—or do you ignore it?

Most sales reps reach for the phone.

We’re living in a world where distractions are all around us. Instead of allowing distractions to steer us off track, take control of your devices and turn off notifications during periods of execution. If you’re working on a proposal for a new client, don’t toggle between the proposal, your inbox, Slack, and Skype. Be present. Be committed to finalizing this single task and then check to see who called or texted you.

7. Surfing the web for distractions

In the same way that our devices make distractions only an arm’s length away, our browsers make distractions a single tab away. It’s not easy to stay focused when you can check Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube or Facebook within seconds. But it’s important to recognize that a “one-minute break” can quickly turn into 20 minutes of cat videos, tasty recipes, and mindless scrolling.

Make time for distractions, but don’t let them interrupt your work. If you really need a break from your work, make sure your distraction time is structured. Block off time on your calendar and get back to work as soon as it’s over.

8. Multi-tasking during calls and meetings

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the various tasks and communication touchpoints your prospects and leads require. You may get so busy that you begin taking other work into meetings and calls rather than being present for the discussion. Hate to break it to you, but it’s been scientifically proven that multi-tasking is actually a myth. You can’t do it. When you think you’re multi-tasking, you’re actually just swapping between the different tasks and not giving any of them your best.

Avoid this trap. Even if it feels like you’re being more productive, recognize that you’re actually doing a disservice to those around you by not giving your full attention to the meeting.

9. Taking rejection personally

As a sales rep, you’re going to be told “no.” You might even be told to never call a certain prospect or lead again. It’s all a part of the game.

But you can’t take it personally.

If you take rejection personally, you will derail your productivity by focusing on something that is no longer relevant. Your attention and energy are better spent focusing directly on things that will impact your goals.

10. Starting from scratch with every email

Sales reps have to send a lot of emails.

Email is one of the most effective methods of B2B communication. If you’re doing inside sales, the number of emails you send each day might be in the hundreds or even thousands.

But you don’t have to do it all by scratch. With CRM and sales tools like Close.io, you can write an email once and use it over and over again when reaching out to prospects or leads. You can save these emails for future use and even personalize them using variables like company name, contact name and more.

Don’t make the mistake of writing every email from scratch. Leverage technology to make your life easier and your days more productive!

What other bad habits are missing?

Can you think of any other bad habits sales reps have embraced but need to shake? I’d love to hear them in the comments so we can help more sales professionals be productive in their day-to-day.

Increase your productivity with the inside sales CRM designed for salespeople by salespeople. No manual data entry. Just pure results.

Recommended reading:

How to optimize your sales productivity and workflow
Guilty of one or more of the 10 habits above? Here are six ways to improve your sales productivity and workflow.

Crush your goals with this 5-task to-do list
Swamped by your never-ending to-do list? It's time for a new system: a to-do list that can actually be done. Here’s how to take back control and get more done.

How the best sales software DOUBLES productivity instead of running it into the ground
Most sales software is designed to collect data, not increase productivity. However, the best software can collect data & DOUBLE productivity. Here's how.

Facebook lead ads are an exciting addition to the Facebook advertising suite since they focus entirely on lead generation.

Essentially, lead ads allow you to add a contact form directly on your ads so you can request information without the user having to leave Facebook.

If you’re looking to get sign ups for your content, price estimates from customers, or any other type of business information, this post is for you!

We’ve got five facts you need to know about your next Facebook lead ad campaign.

How Facebook Lead Ads Work

Facebook lead ads make the process of lead generation seamless by allowing interested parties to fill out forms directly on Facebook.

Most mobile forms take 38.5% longer to fill out than desktop forms but Facebook has solved this with their smartphone-friendly form. When someone clicks on your ad, they’ll see a form that’s already populated with the information they’ve shared on Facebook.

Once the person clicks submit, all of their info is sent to you (the advertiser) — making inbound inquiries easier and faster!

Here’s the step-by-step process for lead ads:

1. Visit your Power Editor to create your lead ad
2. Give your form a name and design your welcome screen
3. Click Questions and choose which questions to ask with your Facebook lead ad
4. Save your ad and start your campaign!

Once your ad is running, you can easily download your leads from Facebook, or you can connect your leads to a CRM.

Now that you understand how these ads work, let’s dive into some best practices!

Tip 1: Create An Eye-Popping Welcome Area

By adding a welcome screen or area, you can give your potential leads more information about your business and the promotion, offer or incentive you’re giving away.

Some ideas for your welcome area are:

• A description of your product(s)
• Description of your service(s)
• Telling people what they’ll receive for submitting your info (free offer, incentive, coupon, free consultation, etc.)

While adding a welcome screen is optional when creating your Facebook lead ads, it’s the area that will likely “make or break” your lead generation abilities.

The example below uses the same example of Jasper’s Market above so you can see how Facebook suggests you use your welcome area.

• Area 1 shows how the lead ad looks in the News Feed.
• Area 2 shows the welcome screen for Jasper’s Market. Notice how they use a colorful picture of produce, and make their copy easy to scan by using bullet points.
• Area 3 shows where the user is taken when they click “sign up now.”

Tip 2: Don’t Get Greedy

As you can see in the Jasper’s Market example above, they only ask for two pieces of information, a full name, and a phone number.

Sure, it’d be awesome sauce to know your lead’s name, phone number, email address, birthday, gender, date of birth, and annual household income. But what do you think your chances are of capturing that lead when you ask for ALL THE THINGS?!

Slim to none.

Studies show that the more information you ask for, the more likely a person is to abandon your form.

Ask for only the most crucial information to ensure your lead form is filled about by the most leads possible.

Formstack actually does this automatically with their tool and shows you form field bottlenecks — or areas where users get hung up on filling out your form.

You might really want that name, but if it’s costing you upwards of 40% completion rate you may want to think of another solution!

Tip 3: Consider Your ‘Give To Get’

You need to be crystal clear with your leads; what are they getting for giving you their valuable information?

We often ask our clients to include a “give to get” or an offer with their lead ad that entices users to share their information.

A few ideas are:

• A free consultation
• Coupons for new customers
• Deals that only your list subscribers will receive

Look at the Jasper’s Market example again and you’ll see on their welcome screen that they really underscore the value users get when signing up.

Tip 4: Your Audience Doesn’t = EVERYONE

Oftentimes, clients want to target anyone and everyone on Facebook with their ads. This isn’t the best idea with any ad, including Facebook lead ads.

The more targeted your target audience is the more conversions on your lead form you will likely obtain.

Our suggestion to clients is always twofold:

• Start with a custom audience — people who are already aware of, interested in, or customers of your business. You can do this by using a customer list, your existing Facebook followers, or by targeting visitors to your website (you can use the handy dandy Facebook pixel for easily grabbing those website visitors and uploading them to Facebook).
• Second, use a lookalike audience — people who are similar to those on your custom audience list, but are not familiar with your brand yet (but they’re similar to people who are!).

By using what you have and then targeting people who are similar to the customers you’ve already served, you’ll have a better chance of showing your ad to a high-quality audience. And that should lead to high-quality leads!

Tip 5: Following Up Quickly Is Key

If a lead does fill our your form for something more than a newsletter sign up, you need to strike while the iron is hot.

If you wait around too long to contact your new leads, they may have already been contacted by — and wooed! — by a competitor.

Our suggested turnaround time for business leads is 24 hours or less.

One way Facebook lead ads make this easier on you is by integrating with many email marketing and CRM (customer-relationship management) tools.

Some of the more popular tools they integrate with are:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Marketo
• Salesforce
• Marketing Cloud

Even if Facebook doesn’t connect with your specific tool’s API, you can use an integration application tool to try to get them to “talk” to each other.

We love Zapier for situations like these!

Other Best Practices

There are plenty of best practices for Facebook lead ads! In fact, Facebook offers an entire page of their own tips for running lead ads.

Have you experimented with lead ads yet? What are some of the best practices or tips you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments section below!