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North Korean hackers reportedly stole about $88,000 (100 million Korean won) worth of bitcoin from South Korean exchanges every month from 2013 to 2015, Yonhap News Agency reports, citing Radio Free Asia.

"Cyber criminals have turned to bitcoin for money as it is very difficult to track them down," Choi Sang-myong, a senior official at South Korea's cybersecurity firm Hauri, told Free Asia Radio. "Since tracking down the culprits is very difficult, North Korea had jumped on the bandwagon of bitcoin extortion since around 2012."

The alleged theft comes as North Korea looks for ways boost its hard currency amid an onslaught of sanctions levied against leader Kim Jong Un's regime, according to Radio Free Asia. 

It's not the first report of cyber hacks from North Korea aimed at the capital markets. Back in February 2016, North Korean hackers allegedly transferred almost $1 billion from Bangladesh Bank's account at the New York Fed by using the SWIFT messaging network. 

News of the alleged theft comes at an interesting time for the cryptocurrency.

Last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission rejected plans for two bitcoin exchange traded funds, partly because of security concerns.

In its ruling on the ETFs, the SEC said, "Based on the record before it, the commission believes that the significant markets for bitcoin are unregulated." The SEC continued, "Therefore, as the exchange has not entered into, and would currently be unable to enter into, the type of surveillance-sharing agreement that has been in place with respect to all previously approved commodity-trust ETPs — agreements that help address concerns about the potential for fraudulent or manipulative acts and practices in this market — the commission does not find the proposed rule change to be consistent with the Exchange Act."

However, the cryptocurrency is gaining acceptance elsewhere. Japanese regulators ruled that as of April 1, bitcoin would be accepted as a legal payment method. Additionally, on Monday, Russia said it would consider recognizing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in 2018. 

Bitcoin has been the top-performing currency every year since 2010, aside from 2014. It's up about 25% so far in 2017. 

SEE ALSO: The first investor in Snapchat thinks each bitcoin could realistically be worth $500,000 by 2030 — Here's how

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: People are outraged by this shocking video showing a passenger forcibly dragged off a United Airlines plane

It was one of Cialdini’s bedrock principles. The one that created demand out of thin air. That compelled people to finally, at long last, take action. To buy, share, and break through the inertia that prevents any change whatsoever.

It’s urgency.

Scarcity forces us to make a decision—to change, even though we’re hardwired not to like change.

Sure, we want the upside. But we can’t stomach the downside in most cases. So nothing happens.

That new pair of shoes just sits in their cart. Or the lead stops following up because “they’re still thinking about it.”

So how do you get them to take the next step?

Here are 13 tried-and-true urgency-inducing tactics you can start using to increase sales.

1. Product Attributes

Product attributes are one of the first places to look for scarcity in action.

For example, notice how that third pair of boots stands out because of the temporary price break.

Now let’s book a vacation.

You pull up Expedia, punch in a city and some travel dates, and hit enter. What you’re met with is a completely commoditized shopping experience. Hotels and vacations and flights are lined up like a cattle call. And you just scan the prices to determine which hotel looks good.

The problem is that most people are just looking. There’s no urgency. So people bounce without booking 81% of the time.

How do you motivate them to take action? Check out how many product attributes Expedia highlights on this page:

The green bar highlights a daily deal. There’s star ratings. A little VIP icon. Microcopy from reviews like “Very good!” and “Excellent!”

There’s also red (danger!) text letting us know exactly how many other people are looking at booking these hotels (taking them from us!) in the last 48 hours.

Not to mention, the little yellow notification over on the right that confirms this destination is popular with other travelers as well.

Phew. That was exhausting just typing it all out.

We’ll analyze some of these specific techniques in more detail soon. However, just know that scarcity doesn’t just mean “only three products left.”

2. Hyper-Specific CTA’s

The Next Web wanted to get more traffic to their deal pages. (‘Cause, you know, this is where the money’s made.)

The primary CTA (or call to action) on the site was a little text link in the main menu navigation. They tested two new versions of the CTA to 163,000+ visitors:

1. The first variation was simply “Deals”
2. The second variation stated a specific number of deals (like “104 Deals”)

The results?

The variation with a specific number of deals increased user engagement by 257.8%.

The specificity, it was hypothesized, “set visitors’ expectations, thereby increasing the amount of traffic that would engage with the ‘Deals’ CTA in the navigation bar.”

FOMO was part of it. Just the simple inclusion of a number suddenly makes people realize what’s in store, and they now understand the “lost value by not taking the action you want them to take.”

3. Site Overlays

They can be annoying. Even rude.

But when you consider the alternatives for driving conversions, you quickly realize that options are running out.

Nobody looks at banner ads today. Haven’t for years. People are also proactively trying to banish them from existence. Ad blocking technology has grown 4X in just the past few years.

Case in point: Those wimpy little sidebar opt-ins only convert at a dismal 0.4%.

The solution? You’re not gonna like it.

But overlay and pop-up technology can increase conversions 2100%.

Websites with pop-ups consistently outperform websites with no pop-ups, and (in case you missed it) can increase conversions by 2100%. Did I mention 2100%?

Sumo analyzed millions of data points and found that the best pop-ups and overlays can reach conversion rates of almost 10%.

Ok… that’s super high. Now we’re listening.

So what distinguishes a good pop-up from a bad one? (Besides, of course, the offer.)

Let’s take a look at one good example from Neil Patel:

Whoa. Not your standard pop-up. There’s a progress bar at the top. Additional text and an arrow over to the right (a visual cue).

And right at the top, in huge block letters, is a countdown timer.

4. Countdown Timers

154 million people purchased something on Black Friday last year.

The reason is summed up perfectly in the lamest, PR-puff quote ever:

“It was a strong weekend for retailers, but an even better weekend for consumers, who took advantage of some really incredible deals.”

Online, Groupon (are they still a thing?) took that idea and ran with it, creating a daily deal site that rode on the backs of small businesses turned flash sales into big business.

One of the best-converting websites online – believe it or not – is the QVC. Which sounds incredibly hard to believe. Until you visit their website and browse around for a bit.

Immediately upon entering their site, you’re met with a daily deal front-and-center:

Thrive’s Ultimatum is one handy little add-on tool. It’s a WordPress plugin that you can install to re-create these limited-time only deals and display them across your site. They even have a feature that restarts the clock for individuals (so it doesn’t have to be set by a fixed-date, but by an individual’s own behavior).

The countdown timer is becoming ubiquitous online now thanks to simple tools like this. Earlier we saw it on Expedia. Then in a site overlay. Now on the QVC. And soon we’ll see it a few other contexts as well.

But first, let’s discuss a close cousin of the countdown timer: limited-time only availability.

5. Limited Availability

When you visit QVC’s site around lunchtime (personalization! see #9 below), QVC will introduce their Lunchtime Specials.

This little section shows up on their homepage and is only available for five hours that day.

Here’s another travel industry example: Look up a hotel on Expedia, and you’ll see that their “limited inventory” (heavy on the air quotes) will only have a few select options left before the price jumps back up.

(Yikes! Could you imagine staying at a $20 hotel? Be sure to bring your own disinfectant wipes.)

Digital products notoriously have no inventory costs. There’s no such thing as a limited quantity per se.

Unless you artificially restrict it anyway to boost conversions when you do “open the doors.”

One of the best in the business is Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to be Rich. Head over to their site and try to purchase a bigger product or program. Curiously, they don’t let you. Instead, you gotta sign up for their newsletter first.

These products are expensive. Intangible. So it takes a little bit of education before you’ll understand the value.

It’s only after a little nurturing that the sales offer becomes available (for a limited time only, of course).

6. NEW!

We’ve all been there, done that. But we’re attracted to newness.

Power words jump off the page. They arrest attention, break patterns and get you to look.

Chief among the most persuasive words are “New” and “Now.” With that in mind, feast your eyes on this:

These products are being featured on QVC (now). Half of them are NEW. One’s on sale. The other is QVC’s Daily Deal.

We like new stuff. Shiny stuff. It’s why we check email and Twitter 10x a day. (Even though most of the stuff we see is junk.) That novelty gives us a tiny shot of dopamine. Enough to sustain us for, well, about another two and a half minutes until we check it again.

The fact that these products are being featured on television (now) also enhances their perceived credibility, too.

7. Notifications

Buy Whole Foods Online is an e-commerce site in the UK.

In order to better reach on-site visitors, they started using targeted push notifications with special offers from PushCrew.

When they first introduced this tactic, 71 people (out of 97 total), followed through to purchase.

These push notifications work best when tied to something that someone is doing right now. For example, the product they’re looking at or the blog post topic they’re reading.

(image source)

Drift turns the once lame live chat into a fully featured messaging and notification platform. You can select WHAT gets displayed WHEN. So the message can be tied to specific page views for example, or the number of times someone has visited.

(image source)

Neil Patel uses his notification to show a – what else – countdown timer that’s tied to an offer that’s about to expire. (It even rings to get your attention. No joke.)

Click on it, and it’ll expand into something that looks like the pop-up we featured from him earlier (complete with progress bar indicating you’re pretty much already done and ready to receive the offer).

This is also a perfect segue because it’s the offer here that dictates conversions over everything else: the autopilot webinar.

8. Autopilot Webinars

Webinars are a classic piece of a B2B marketer’s arsenal.

But here’s the struggle: Getting people to actually attend the damn thing.

Maybe 30% of those who sign up will attend. If you’re lucky.

You can’t blame them, though. They signed up like two weeks ago and it’s easy to forgot. They had that urgency two weeks ago. But it’s dissipated now over the past few weeks and they’ve got other stuff on their minds.

The solution?

Run them every single day. Hourly even.

That’s impossible! You’re only a mortal.

And yet, that’s what it appears is happening…

Thursday morning, 8:12 am on March 30th. I went to a site and saw this:

Trust me when I say that I’m not that lucky. Good fortune like that doesn’t just happen. Merely a coincidence.

No. It’s more likely something like WebinarJam was used to re-run a previously live webinar so they could take advantage of the urgency that I was feeling right at that moment.

That removes the huge lag in time, reducing the likelihood that someone would sign up and leave forever. And it gives them a better shot to of course sell something at the end of the webinar.

9. Next-Level Personalization

A third of marketers say personalized marketing is the most important trend, and almost everyone (77%) agrees that it’s an important development.

But “Hey $FNAME” doesn’t cut it.

Instead, check this out:

Entire sections of a homepage curated and recommended based on your past behavior on their site.

Your landing pages should follow suit—pulling in personal details like if someone has visited your site before, purchased from you in the past, or simply the city or time of day they’re visiting.

Optimizely’s Personalization is one such tool that customizes what you see based on some previous detail. This example shows a cup of coffee in the background and a simple but friendly Good morning! (based on time of day that the page is viewed), which immediately stands out against a sea of static sameness across other sites.

10. Pre-Suasion

Behave (formerly WhichTestWon) featured an email test from online real estate site Home Union. This email is designed for investors. Keep that in mind when you compare the two versions:

The one on the left gets into technical investment details. The one on the right, key home features.

You’d think the first variation (investment details) would appeal to professional investors. I did. And yet we’d all be wrong.

The second email (key features) resulted in a 33.8% lift in click-to-open.

The reasoning? Pre-Suasion (also Cialdini’s latest effort).

In other words, the first email focused on stuff that, while important, wouldn’t materialize for years and years and years. The second focused on features that they could get right now.

Behave also featured an excellent quote from The Business of Choice, by Matthew Wilcox:

“Consumers are far more motivated to make a decision that seems beneficial in the immediate-term — even if the benefits diminish over the long-term.”

Like when they’re going to get something RIGHT NOW…

11. Immediate Gratification

Amazon’s 1-Click to Buy feature is patented.

It saves your pre-set preferences so that all you (the consumer) have to do is click a single button (on any device) to immediately purchase the product.

Helpful and convenient, no doubt. But why take the time, effort, and money to patent something like that?

Because it’s worth billions.

Amazon Prime customers spend $1,340 annually – double what non-prime ones spend. The hallmark of that program is the free two-day shipping. And Amazon is even doubling down, investing in planes and drones to deliver things faster.

So they’re doing everything in their power to get you products faster. Like, now.

According to BigCommerce’s Tracey Wallace in their Omni Channel Retail Report, “shipping cost and speed (80%)” are the second most important reason behind why people buy (or not) online (after price).

So much so, that they’re essentially subsidizing this cost for customers:

“For retailers, especially independent boutiques and webstores, perks like ‘free shipping’ are being more frequently offered and considered a marketing expense. For larger chains like Amazon, the net loss is worth the increase in brand reputation.”

Of course, other companies are going to come out with their own variation. QVC uses a Speed Buy that works similarly. And their handy Delivery Date Estimate on every product page helps you figure out exactly when to expect that product hitting your doorstep.

12. Risk-Reversing Payment Options

QVC has become famous for their installment payment plans.

This infomercial-esque technique allows people to split up payments into equal installments over the course of a few months. That way, what looks big and expensive suddenly becomes affordable for those on a tight budget. (Like the old people that buy this stuff.)

QVC even sweetens the deal with their QCard that has interest-friendly terms.

High-end, expensive services can be sold the same way. Here’s how Work the System splits up payment for their coaching services into budget-friendly installment plans:

New e-commerce payment options are popping up from companies like Affirm, who’re essentially doing the same thing (albeit, financing purchases themselves).

You can apply to their service and have the product price split over a few months instead of one huge lump sum.

13. Automatic Follow-up Emails

Last but not least is good old-fashioned marketing automation.

Y’all know the drill. It’s got the power to increase sales 34%. Not to mention slashing your internal overhead of manually having to try and send this stuff out.

The Shopping Cart Abandonment idea can (and should) be applied to nearly everything that happens on your site. Every almost purchase that got away. No matter if that’s a product or simply someone looking at your Plans & Pricing page.

So when they search for a hotel but don’t purchase, the corresponding follow-up email goes out immediately, urging them to come back and book.

Getting what you want, when you want it

Selling online is difficult because so many online goods and services are “nice to have,” not “essential.”

(Not to mention, competitors are a click away and there’s nothing preventing your prospective customer from navigating away at any time.)

The brick wall standing in between you and more customers is inertia. In order to increase sales, you first have to increase urgency so people want have to buy NOW.

The antidote to inertia is urgency.

Trouble is, urgency doesn’t always just…exist. You have to create it, and you can start by using one of these 13 urgency-including tips and tricks to get people to take action once and for all:

1. Enhanced product attributes
2. Specific numbers in CTA’s
3. Pop-up offers
4. Countdown timers
5. Limited availability
6. The word “new”
7. Push notifications
8. Autopilot webinars
9. Extreme personalization
10. Near-term benefits
11. Immediate gratification
12. Lots of payment options
13. Automated follow-ups

I love to travel.

It would be friendlier to my wallet if I loved gardening herbs or distance running or ... pretty much anything else. But for me, there's nothing like a good view over the Mediterranean, even if it's thousands of miles — and dollars — from home.

The internet is brimming with money-saving travel tips, and there are some great ones. For instance, you can select your destinations based on favorable exchange rates. You can stalk flight websites to avoid the most expensive days, or manipulate hundreds of thousands of credit card and hotel points.

But you know what they all have in common? They're work — work to research, work to track, work to manipulate.

I've found that my best strategies to save money while traveling are the easy decisions I make before I go. Before pretty much every trip I've ever taken, I've made these decisions:

SEE ALSO: Making the same 2 decisions before any trip I take has helped me pack lighter for years

I choose to align my spending with my priorities.

It might sound as though I'm hitchhiking across a barren desert, gnawing on a single allotted apple per day, but in fact, I'm happy to spend money while I travel — as long as it's on the things I care about.

For instance, in Hvar, Croatia, I shelled out a few hundred extra dollars to extend my stay in a seaside luxury hotel because I couldn't remember a time in recent history I'd been happier than when I was tanning next to the Adriatic Sea. Later that trip, I bought a bus tour to Montenegro, across the border, to fulfill a yearslong plan to see where the beautiful James Bond film "Casino Royale" was filmed.

Side note: It turns out it was not filmed at the actual Casino Royale. Know that before you take an eight-hour bus tour.

Things I don't care much about: food, daytime flights, adventurous excursions, clothing, jewelry, posh stores, spas. So I don't spend much on them.

I choose to hit the grocery store.

One of the things I don't care much about is food. Michelin-starred restaurants hold little appeal to me, and there is no way you're going to persuade me to take two hours away from the sun to eat a sit-down lunch.

I recognize that many people travel for the food. If that's you, feel free to vent your derision at the computer or scroll on down to the next point.

But the cool thing about being in another country, or even city, is that a lot of the best food, the food local people eat, isn't found in those sit-down restaurants. It's found at the corner store, street fair, or grocery store. I've never eaten mediocre bread in Italy or Spain. The English Cadbury chocolate you find below every retail counter is great. And, for some reason, European countries always seem to have the best flavors of yogurt.

When I land somewhere new, I plan on hitting the grocery store on Day One. That way, I'm set for a handful of delicious, easy, and cheap meals right off the bat.

I choose to travel in 'shoulder season.'

I've written before about traveling in "shoulder season," just before or after the high season in your destination.

In the Caribbean, high season is the winter. In most of Europe, it's the summer. It's the time when that place is best shown to its advantage, so people go see it.

It's also the most expensive time to go, because the tourism industry knows what's up.

By choosing to travel six to eight weeks before or after high season, I save money on flights, accommodations, car rentals, and most everything else — by making one decision and never thinking about it again.

It seems obvious, but a lot of people don't do it.

It isn't the off-season. I'm not going during monsoon season or blizzards. Really, the only difference is a few degrees — a light sweater, or removal thereof.

And the financial benefits are huge.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

No doubt you’ve heard of Simon Sinek’s Start With Why TedX talks or his books, but did you know that the origins of The 9 Whys are the work of Dr. Gary Sanchez of the Why Institute? In the slim chance you haven’t heard of either speaker, its a construct of 9 motivations that most people identify with as their primary ‘purpose’ in life.

The 9 Whys (simplified):

1. To contribute to a greater cause, to add value
2. To create relationships based on trust
3. To make sense out of complex things
4. To find a better way of doing things
5. To do things the right way
6. To challenge the status quo with new thinking
7. To seek mastery and understanding
8. To seek clarity
9. To simplify

Proponents of this system of identifying motivations share a belief that these are all learned responses, otherwise known as biases. Meaning, that your thinking has been reinforced over a lifetime of experiences to form a preference for one motivator over the others.

Applying this thinking to what we do as marketers suggests that people arrive on our doorsteps consciously or subconsciously seeking confirmation that we – or our businesses – match their why and thus are a “fit” or not, qualified or not.

Leading With Your Why

9 Whys advocates support leading with your Why in both business and personal life, convinced that sharing your motivation is integral to transparent communication which is of itself trust building. Makes perfect sense actually… in an all-life-is-super-rosy context. But, what happens when you lump in a bit of real life?

Do we automatically adjust for circumstance? Or are we suppressing our Why?

Apparently a huge percentage of us don’t like our jobs (entrepreneurs included). Is that because our bosses subscribe to a different Why? What happens when your spouse has a different Why? What if – given your Why is formed from life experiences – our Why were to change over time as we grow and experience new things? Plausible, I imagine.

Can different Whys get along?

Can an individual focussed on simplification be motivated by a higher cause? I don’t see why not. Do I have to pick just one? Would you pick just one? I’m curious… how do you express your Why?

A common business refrain is that the customer is always right.

And we’ve all heard stories of companies and employees going to ridiculous lengths to meet customer needs.

But what if the customer isn’t always right? Are there times when it’s better to tell the customer that they’re wrong?

Yes!

In fact, treating the customers like they are always right can actually be harmful to your business. It can dampen employee morale, use up vital resources, and even hurt your best customers.

Don’t believe me?

Here are 7 reasons why your customers are NOT always right.

Reason #1: Because You Have Limited Resources

You and your employees have limited resources. You have limited time, money, energy, and even patience. The ugly truth is there are some customers who will never be satisfied, no matter how far you bend over. No matter how much time you dedicate, these customers will still be unhappy with what you provide.

If you’ve done your best to address their issues, you shouldn’t feel guilty about moving on. In fact, it’s your responsibility to keep going. Your business does not exist solely for that customer. You also meet the needs of hundreds of other customers, as well as support your employees. It’s actually irresponsible to continue pouring yourself into one customer at the expense of other people.

Peter Fader says:

Not all customers deserve your company’s best efforts. And despite what the old adage says, the customer is most definitely not always right. Because in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers…and then there is everybody else.

Reason #2: It Makes Your Employees Miserable

There will always be nasty, abrasive, grumpy customers, especially if your business serves a large number of people. If you deal with 100 customers per week, there’s a good chance that ten of them will have woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

Now, you certainly don’t want to respond like the “Soup Nazi” from Seinfeld.

But if you tell your employees to treat the customer like they’re always right, you’ll make the employees miserable. When it comes down to supporting your employees or supporting an insufferable, irate customer, you want to support your employees. You want customers to know that, while you value them, you won’t let them abuse your employees.

Yes, there will occasionally be times when your employees may mistreat a customer. But the solution isn’t to declare that the customer is always right. The solution is to support your employees with proper training.

And, the more you support your employees, the better customer service they’ll provide to your other customers. As a general rule, unhappy employees provide poor customer service, while happy employees are more than willing to go the extra mile.

Supporting your employees pays dividends.

Reason #3: The Customer Isn’t The Expert

Who knows your product or service best? You and your employees. There will be times when a customer thinks they are the expert. When they assume that something is supposed to work a certain way. When they presume to know how to run your business.

This can reach ludicrous proportions. The man who is upset that his mobile phone won’t also work as a laser gun. The woman who is frustrated that her car won’t drive autonomously. The child who is angry that the pet shelter doesn’t have a monkey.

Of course, this can happen on a much smaller scale as well. When a customer is frustrated because your product doesn’t do exactly what they thought it did. Or when the customer destroyed your product by using it improperly.

Depending on your industry, it can actually be dangerous to let the customer think they’re always right.

Rather than acting like the customer is always right, a better solution is to treat your customers like you are the expert. Obviously, don’t do this in an obnoxious or arrogant way, but in a helpful way. Help them understand the best ways to utilize your product or service. Help them see that your product or service is to be employed in a particular way.

This will keep you from going crazy and result in happier customers.

Reason #4: It Pits Management and Customers Against The Employees

When you inform your employees that the customer is always right, it pits the employees against the customers, with the customers always coming out on top. This creates problems on multiple levels.

• It undermines the authority and control of the employees.
• It often causes employee resentment against managers.
• It signals that management supports customers more than employees.
• It shows a lack of trust that employees can appropriately resolve difficult situations.

The reality is, supporting your employees will lead to happier customers. Alexander Kjerulf writes:

Believing the customer is always right is a subconscious way of favouring the customer over the employee which can lead to resentment among employees. When managers put the employees first, the employees will then put the customers first. Put employees first and they will be happy at work.

Reason #5: You Don’t Want Every Customer

Believe it or not, there are some customers you DON’T want. If a customer constantly complains, abuses employees, or creates stress for your company, they’re not worth it. It doesn’t matter how much money they pay.

A bad customer:

• Erodes employee morale
• Requires an unusually high amount of resources
• Increases employee stress levels
• And more

There may be times when you have to “fire” a customer in order to protect your company and employees. If you’re planning on staying in business for the long haul, you need to avoid terrible customers.

Dropping bad customers may cost you a little revenue in the short term, but it’s better in the long term for your business.

Reason #6: The Customer Wants To Maintain The Norm

Any time a business makes changes, they will receive backlash from customers, even if these are good changes in the long run. When Toblerone changed the shape of their iconic chocolate bars, customers went absolutely bananas. It wasn’t that the new shape of the bars was bad, per se. It was just different, and people HATE different.

Customers like to maintain the norm. If you make changes in your business, you will probably get some initial backlash, even if the change is for the better. If you have the attitude that the customer is always right, you’ll never make healthy improvements to your business because. The possibility of bad customer feedback will paralyze you.

As Bubba Page writes:

All entrepreneurs should be focused on ways to improve their business, their productivity, and their service, if only because stagnation is the enemy of business growth. Quite often, changes in the status quo feel inconvenient to customers, even if they will be beneficial in the long run.

Reason #7: Bad Customers Create Bad Experiences For Others

Unhappy, irate, grumpy customers not only cause bad experiences for employees, they also make other customers miserable.

We’ve all had the experience of being in a store when another customer flies off the handle. They cuss and scream and stomp around. Everyone feels uncomfortable and wants to get out of the store as soon as possible. No one enjoys being in that kind of situation.

If you constantly put up with angry, irate customers, you’re creating bad experiences for your more loyal customers. You’re allowing unpleasant, stressful situations to regularly affect your more important customers.

These customers simply aren’t right, and your employees should have the authority to deal with them appropriately.

Conclusion

It goes without saying that you and your employees should strive for excellent customer service. You should make an effort to keep your customers happy and to meet their needs.

But if you adopt, “The customer is always right,” policy, you can end up actually hurting your business. You kill employee morale, empower rude customers, slow down innovation, and even create unhappy experiences for other customers.

A much better approach is to empower your employees to make the right decisions. Encourage them to go the extra mile with customers without also enabling rude customers to take over.

In our 2017 Selling Challenges Survey, more than 350 sales professionals  were asked “What will be your toughest negotiation challenge in 2017?” The top responses included:

• Gaining Higher Prices (24%)
• Closing Win-Win Deals (20%)
• Maintaining Profitability (11%)

“Gaining higher prices” has been the top negotiating challenge for three years running. This year’s top challenges indicate a laser-sharp focus on negotiation outcomes — prices, wins, and profits. “Closing win-win deals” shows the value sellers place on building trust and credibility in order to develop long-term, productive relationships. “Maintaining profitability” is a challenge made visible by the greater availability of real-time sales data, which allows organizations to be smarter about decisions affecting profits. “Managing procurement” is another response worth noting, rising from 4% in 2016 to 11% in 2017. This reflects the increasing involvement of procurement staff as they join the decision-making team late in the process without any emotional attachment to the deal. Their role is to drive down price or get additional products or services for the same price. While this specific challenge didn’t make the top three, its impact is reflected there.

Richardson’s Negotiation Insights

Trust and credibility are keys to managing relationships with customers and closing win-win deals. Sellers can’t claim trusted advisor status; it has to be earned. Being a trusted partner begins with integrity but also requires skill and strategy, which can be learned and practiced.

Sellers need a process for how to negotiate a win-win deal, understanding when and how to unlock a deadline and when it’s best to walk away.

In closing a negotiation, be prepared for the “nibble,” in which clients expect something extra without additional cost. The response should depend on how the change affects the seller, profitability, and the relationship. Throughout the negotiation, sellers need to stay in control of the process, follow up thoroughly and quickly, deliver on the agreed deal, and check for satisfaction.

Click here to download Richardson’s complimentary report, “Understanding Selling Challenges in 2017.”

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Connect with us at 215.940.9255 or info@richardson.com to learn how we can help your sales organization with their current challenges.

The post Understanding Selling Challenges in 2017: Negotiation Insights appeared first on Richardson Sales Training & Enablement Blog.

In B2B content marketing, we’ve almost seen it all: The success when people get it right. The mistakes that cause content to crash and burn. It’s those mistakes that we’re going to focus on today so we can ensure you avoid them in the future. Read on to learn how.

Some of these mistakes are old timers — others are newbies as the B2B marketing industry has evolved. We’ve created a comprehensive list tthat will help you ace content marketing.

7 Mistakes That Harm B2B Content Marketing Success

1. Slap Together a Haphazard Editorial Calendar

There should be nothing haphazard about your editorial calendar. It’s your roadmap that guides you through the entire content creation process. It keeps you aligned with your monthly goals and campaigns. If it is just thrown together for the simple sake of having a calendar, it may impress your higher-ups, but it won’t help you reach your content marketing goals.

There’s a good reason why 53% of the most effective content marketers have a documented strategy — it works! Work hard to plan topics and content formats that fit your monthly campaign goals, and you’ll have a B2B content strategy that works.

2. Put All Your Content Eggs in One Basket

There’s an old adage that is particularly true in content marketing: “Different strokes for different folks.” You probably have your own content preference — whether it’s reading blog posts, watching how-to videos, or browsing an infographic. While some may share your preference, there are many more who don’t. If you focus all your energy on creating one kind of content, you’re ignoring a wide swath of your audience.

The reality is that you may have the best content, but if someone can’t find the content type they prefer, they’ll go elsewhere. Think out of the box, with content such as:

• Videos
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Slideshares
• Blog posts
• Visual graphics
• Case studies
• eBooks
• White papers

For example, a recent study showed that 78% of B2B buyers prefer case studies over other content types. Are you incorporating case studies in your B2B content marketing strategy? Discover ways to involve your current clients — consider offering them incentives, such as a discount. Once you have case study subjects, ask them what difficulties they had in the past and how your company has helped them to resolve those problems. Besides a case study, turn this content into a video testimonial, or snippets to be used in social media.

Make sure that you’re casting your net as widel as possible. The more expansive your net, the more likely you’ll catch someone’s interests.

3. Stubbornly Pursuing Goals of Viral Content

Yes, everybody wants to create a viral sensation. It has even seeped into the mindset of some B2B content marketers that viral content is the gold standard. While it would be great to see your content voraciously shared, banish that thought. Here’s why.

It is virtually impossible to predict what content will go viral — there’s no secret formula for success. Typically, content that goes viral happens by chance. The best thing you can do is focus on the quality of your content and put those viral dreams away.

4. Only Sharing Content Once

Unfortunately, because of the flood of content on the internet, if you only share your content when it is initially created, you doom it to the proverbial back-of-the-closet space of the internet. You’ve worked hard on your conten so don’t let it evaporate after just one go.

People take to their social networks at every hour of the day, so share your content multiple times per day initally and then sprinkle it in in the following weeks. Each time, you’re bound to get new eyeballs on it and new click-throughs to your website.

5. Not Using Metrics

Did a lead come from your social media or email campaign? Are people clicking through from LinkedIn or Twitter? You won’t know unless you use metrics. Failing to use metrics is like driving your B2B content strategy blindfolded. Measurement is a vital component to your content marketing.

Today’s technology lets you match your content to specific leads. Services like Bitly generate unique tracking codes and URLs that you can attach to a specific piece of content or social media post — showing you how people find your content. Google Analytics shows you how many people are accessing which blog posts. This let yous amplify what works, and ditch what doesn’t make the cut.

6. Not Optimizing for Mobile

More than ever, professionals are accessing content on-the-go. Is your content optimized for a smooth and enjoyable mobile experience? What does it look like on a smartphone or tablet? It’s important to find out and improve it.

For instance, if your content is too busy, it will be overwhelming on a small screen. The solution is to utilize white space — multiple paragraphs separated by white space make your content easier to digest.

Visual graphics are another way to enhance the mobile experience. A well-placed image can break up paragraphs of text. An infographic may also make for an easier on-the-go reading experience. Before you publish any piece of conten, ask yourself, “How will this content look on a mobile device?”

7. Being Too Self Promotional

Many B2B content marketers fall into the trap of creating boastful content for the sole purpose of self-promotion. But honestly, outside of your parents, nobdy wants to read about how wonderful you are. Instead, they want you to prove it.

Create content that showcases your unique industry expertise, and builds your credibility in the minds of your audience. Great content fills a need for the audience — answers questions, offers unique insight, or educates. This is the kind of content that will truly promote your business.

Key Points to Remember

• Develop an editorial calendar that will keep you on the right track throughout your content creation process.
• Create a variety of content to satisfy a wide array of preferences — and don’t forget to include case studies, which are a growing trend.
• Measure your efforts to know what content is working, and what needs to be changed.
• Optimize all of your content for a smooth and enjoyable mobile experience.

There you have it — knowing what not to do in B2B content marketing can help you to focus on developing a method that will truly help your B2B company succeed!

Just like with dating, the best cold emails make a point to be seductive. Your goal is to entice new customers into doing what you ask, whether that’s replying to your email, signing up for your newsletter, or making time for a call.

That’s why you need to provide your prospects with a clear and straightforward blueprint on next steps. Ending a date on a vague note leaves everyone feeling unsatisfied. The same is true for cold email: How can you lure someone in if they feel unsure of your intentions? Without a strong and singular call to action, your prospect may be confused or overwhelmed, making it less likely for them to respond.

Mixed messages, like the ones contained in this email, are better left unsent:

From the start, this email is impersonal, indifferent, wordy, and vague. More importantly, it’s unclear as to what the sender’s call to action really is… because there are eight.

Let’s take a look at where her requests went wrong:

1. Uses a boring, tepid hook

The sender opens with a vague statement that she is “following up to see what business we might do together.” Not only is this an incredibly snooze-inducing opening, it also implies a lack of preparedness on her part. Why is she emailing if she doesn’t already have an idea as to what business you can do together? Isn’t she the one seducing you?

2. Fails to incentivize

Her next ask, after a long-winded introduction to her unnamed company, is that you visit her website and watch a video about another company, LinkedIn. But does she really care?

By using lazy language like “If this is of interest to you” and “feel free to visit,” the sender makes it seem like she’s indifferent as to whether you follow through. Instead of leaving the invitation so open-ended, she should have incentivized you with added value. Imagine how differently this would read if she promised to share the company’s top secrets for generating hot leads!

3. Builds barriers to responses

But no. Instead, the sender asks you to request a custom proposal from her website, “if this makes sense for your business.” Is she just playing hard to get? A call to action should be simple and clear, and by asking you to take two steps—visiting her site and then requesting a proposal—she just made it less likely that you will respond.

4. Includes too many links

“I know,” the sender might think, “maybe you’d reply if you just watched the short video again.” Fun fact: 80 – 90% of readers will not click on links, so we don’t recommend including them. Plus, they can seem a bit spammy, especially when you include them more than once, as this sender does.

5. Fails to target her pitch

You should also request a custom proposal. Did she mention that already? This is starting to seem a bit self-serving, and no one appreciates a self-centered call to action.

6. Goes for a hand-off

If you are the exception, though, and this redundant generic email has you so intrigued that you want to hear more, the sender tells you that you can email her a lot of information and she’ll arrange a call for you with someone completely different. While a phone call is often the goal of a call to action, the sender’s hand-off approach is impersonal and doesn’t cast the sender, or her company, in a positive light.

7. Includes irrelevant info

That’s okay, though, because she invited you to mine her connections, if you want! Talk about blowing hot and cold.

8. Redundant, redundant, redundant

But really… did you watch the video? Because nothing says fun like a boring demo video.

It’s a lot to unpack, and with the sender delivering so many mixed messages, you can bet the prospect took a hard pass on that [business] relationship.

Have bad cold emails in your inbox? Send them to us!

Help us fight the thoughtless spammers, one crappy cold email at a time by sending us the worst cold emails you’ve ever received.

We’ll put them up anonymously on the “Hall of Shame,” and shoot you an email when they go live.

Please send all submissions to “shame@salesfolk.com.”
(And feel free to suggest what you want to nominate the “bad cold email for!”)

The post Mixed Messages You Shouldn’t Be Sending in Your Sales Emails appeared first on Salesfolk.

If you’ve ever sat through a presentation that went around the block a few times before finally arriving at its destination, you understand the need for a clear, comprehensible structure for your message.

Structure isn’t just for keeping you, the presenter, from getting lost in the weeds. As a salesperson, you need to organize your message in a way that has the greatest impact on your audience and ultimately encourages them to take action.

Almost any structure will help you get your arms around information, prioritize, and organize it. However, the right structure can set you up for success and increase your odds of winning the business.

The Basic Three-Act Presentation Structure

Breaking content into an opening, a body, and a conclusion is the basis of most presentations, movies, TV shows, and speeches. This basic three-act structure was invented by Aristotle and has stood the test of time. It’s familiar to audiences, digestible, and easy to follow. In fact, if you’ve ever felt uncomfortable or confused watching a movie, it’s often because the writer has broken the three-act structure (Memento and Inception are two examples).

A three-act structure is a great place to start for just about any presentation. But within this framework there are several variations. For instance, you could sort information chronologically, by process, or priority, and so on.

If your goal is to educate or inform, these variations are fine -- but they're not optimal for persuasion. To do use, that the Situation, Complication, Resolution framework.

SCR: The Best Sales Presentation Structure of All

Situation, Complication, Resolution is really just a way of identifying:

• Our present state
• The problem
• What should we do about it

First identified in Barbara Minto’s book The Pyramid Principle, the SCR structure is an effective way of establishing a persuasive case and will be familiar to anyone who consumes movies, TV, or books.

Here’s an example of the SCR structure in a story:

Situation: A girl is kidnapped. If a steep ransom is not paid by midnight, a bomb will explode.

Complication: The girl's family can’t get the money together. No one knows where the bomb is except the hero. The hero is stuck on a remote island.

Resolution: The hero jumps on a plane, finds the girl, detonates the bomb, and saves the world.

If that sounds like the framework of most movies you’ve seen, there’s a good reason. The SCR structure organizes content in a way that takes people on a journey that leads to a natural conclusion. It builds up tension in the audience which increases their attention and their desire for a resolution.

By following this proven structure in sales, you can produce the same effect on your business audience. Let’s look at how you can leverage each act in your sales presentation.

Situation

To take someone on a journey, you must first know where that journey begins. In this first act, define the status quo. What is the critical business issue or challenge your prospect is experiencing, how is he addressing it, and what is the impact?

This act lays the groundwork for why your prospect needs to change and assures him you have a clear understanding of his situation. Ending this first act by painting a brief picture of where this journey can lead (i.e., current state versus potential future state) creates an uncomfortable but necessary disparity between where your prospect is and where he wants to be.

Complication

In this act, introduce complications or consequences that are likely to arise as a result of your prospect not taking action, or choosing an inadequate solution to his problem. Create tension which will make sticking with the status quo or putting off a decision less desirable.

Because most people are uncomfortable with indecision, tension taps into our innate human desire to solve the problem. Widening the gap between pain and relief increases your prospect’s urgency to take action.

Resolution

Finally, when tension is at its peak, relieve that tension by providing a clear solution to the problem and making it easy for your prospect to act upon. While many structures require the presenter to deliver a heavy handed close at this point, in the SCR structure, the resolution comes as a natural conclusion to the journey.

The SCR Presentation in Action

Let’s look at how you might use the three-act SCR structure in a business example.

Situation: An HR department is doing most of their reports manually. This currently takes 1.5 days per week of each HR person’s time.

Complication: The company is growing at a rate of 20% per year. Projected HR workload will escalate to two days per week if nothing changes and the chances for errors will increase. Employee satisfaction will decline and turnover rates will go up.

Resolution: Deploy an HR workforce application that will reduce time spent on current processes from 1.5 days per week to .25 days per week, resulting in greater efficiency, fewer errors, increased satisfaction, and a lower turnover rate.

In sales, you need every advantage you can get. Following the Situation, Complication, Resolution structure gives you a jumpstart on presenting a persuasive case for why your prospect should choose your solution and make the desired change.

 

We all remember the adage: Good sales people are like spear throwers, whilst marketing casts the net.

Spear throwing is so '90s. It may as well be Neolithic.

In this age of modern technology, I've found the machine gun is a more accurate metaphor for most salespeople when they begin.

They lack focus and often pick too many targets -- many of which are not the right ones.

This often leads to longer ramp time, countless burnt leads, and a non-structured approach that's hard to measure and even harder to repeat.

As salespeople gradually mature, I think they become more like rocket launchers.

They become more effective in closing deals, but often there is a certain amount of fall out in every deal. This is visible in:

• Signs of weakness in the handover to customer success
• Customers confused about features that were misrepresented or not mentioned during the sales process
• Some internal stakeholders feeling off put by the conduct of the lead salesperson and potentially reluctant to work with them again
• Incomplete CRM records, making attribution almost impossible
• Key points of contact on the customer side who feel the sales person was less experienced or careless, diluting experience and brand equity

At a certain level of expertise, my best sales people evolve into revenue ‘snipers.’

They demonstrate an extraordinarily ability to research, select, and close business in a way that you can rely upon.

For ease of explanation, I’d like to introduce the SNIPER methodology. This acronym is extremely helpful in teaching and practicing the approach:

• Select
• Negotiate
• Individualize
• Personalize
• Execute
• Repeat

Select

A sales rep carefully takes the time to make two key selections.

The first is choosing which account to target based on extensive research (most of which can be done online using public data).

The second and most commonly forgotten step is to conduct a second degree of selection as to which POCs (point of contacts) are most likely to exhibit the problems the salesperson knows their product can solve.

A SNIPER salesperson usually updates the CRM with this information, allowing them to personalize subsequent interactions.

Negotiate

We must not forget that in most situations we seek to avoid conflict. That is why a SNIPER must exhibit supreme skills in negotiation -- making the client feel as if they are being heard and that compromises are being made on both sides.

Individualize

Elite SNIPERs are known for having a trademark; the signs of their involvement are always clearly visible.

I like to use physical touches, such as wearing a cowboy hat and attending meetings with unique clothing. You can also differentiate yourself by your speaking style, professionalism, subject matter knowledge, and punctuality in replies.

The goal: Make yourself memorable and unique from the other 99 sales people who'll come knocking on the door.

Personalize

Every effective SNIPER takes the time to tailor a strategy based on the specific characteristics of each target they select.

Although reps consistently use the SNIPER methodology, they tailor their approach to each prospect to create interest and service their unique needs.

Taking time to create one-to-one emails, proactively avoiding common vendor assumptions, and making the effort to meet in person are all signs of SNIPER's highly personalized strategy.

Execute

Execution separates the good from the best. Often the steps above can be followed directly, yet still most people have something missing when it comes to the close.

SNIPERs attempt to complete the mission at all costs. This is justified because they're only targeting fully qualified opportunities, as predicated by the first step.

In the unlikely event that despite following this method, something occurs dynamically which may stall the deal (such as a merger or acquisition), they are ready to immediately abort and move on to a target with a higher chance of success.

Repeat

SNIPERs are different from standard performers in that they follow this method time and time again. Stopping only to make minor technique modifications, they generally build further pipeline velocity through the efficiency created.

Additionally, their methodical approach makes them perfect future mentors for new hires and/or sales managers.

Would you rather hold onto the spear, or do you believe that the SNIPER method has a place? Let me know in the comments below.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on LinkedIn and has been republished here with permission.

Companies purchase sales software primarily with strategy in mind. They want to collect data that will help inform the business’ evolving strategy and drive long-term growth.

In many cases, this is bad news for the sales staff. It means they have to learn complicated, unintuitive new software. It means they have to spend a significant chunk of extra time each day manually logging all sorts of activities. It means they have less time to actually sell.

In short, it means a decrease in productivity, and it happens so often that 63% of all new CRM rollouts fail.

At the same time, studies show that sales teams using CRMs outperform teams without sales software across several key metrics:

The good news is that it’s possible for sales software to give you the best of both worlds—to help you drive strategic growth while actually increasing productivity as well.

Today, we’re going to show you why so many CRMs sabotage productivity, waste money, and suffocate a sales team’s performance into a slow, gasping trickle. We’re also going to look at how the right sales software can help you track data and drive strategy while actually increasing productivity in the process.

First things first: Why modern sales is so damn complicated

Sales should be really simple.

A salesperson contacts and qualifies a lead, then attempts to close the sale.

That’s it.

Contact. Qualify. Close.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat

This is the core of sales, and it should account for the vast majority of time spent by any given sales team.

So where do things get complicated?

Well, there are a handful of big issues that tend to scale with the size of the company:

1. Leads come in from multiple channels at varying levels of warmth and qualification.
2. Lead follow-up needs to be tracked and recorded across thousands of interactions.
3. Data needs to be analyzed and utilized for adjusting sales strategies.

In the digital age, there are more channels than ever actively bringing in leads for businesses. Each channel brings in a different variety of leads and some even bring in multiple unique segments.

Each segment must be nurtured and sold to differently, and ALL of this activity must be tracked, recorded, and analyzed. We’re talking thousands upon thousands of data events, and the bigger the business, the more activity needs to be coordinated and the more data needs to be tracked.

It’s virtually impossible to do all this without software.

And when it comes to sales, the central piece of software is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

Your CRM platform is supposed to be the central cog in your business machine, connecting marketing, sales, analysis, and retention into one cohesive, automated system on which your entire business is built.

As we mentioned earlier, the CRM’s number goal is usually to inform strategic decision-making, and that has often come at the cost of sales team productivity. Instead of making day-to-day activities simpler and more efficient, it often ends up doing the exact opposite.

Let’s look at why that’s the case.

Click here to try Close.io for free. 

Why 63% of CRM rollouts fail

Just like it takes two people to have an argument, CRM failure can be the result of both the CRM platform and company itself. For the purposes of this discussion, we are going to focus on platform-based factors that prevent a successful rollout.

Here are the 4 primary software-based reasons sales software fails:

1. Expensive, complicated setup
2. Not built with sales staff in mind
3. Shady pricing models
4. Limited integration

Let’s take a close look at each of these problems.

1. Expensive, overly complicated setup & maintenance

The simplest way to put this into perspective is to point out that the largest CRM platforms have created multimillion dollar third party industries devoted to helping companies set up & maintain the platforms and train staff in their use.

Implementation for even a small team typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars and can take several months to get fully up and running. For some of the leading CRMs, it’s recommended that companies have a full-time administrator devoted entirely to running and maintaining the platform.

While this isn’t an issue for larger companies, it can be a significant and unsustainable expenditure for SMBs and startups.

Expensive, complicated setups and maintenance are just the first reason many CRM rollouts fail.

2. Not built with sales staff in mind

Using new software is always a challenge, even when that software is built intuitively and with the end user in mind.

Unfortunately, this is not the way a lot of sales software is built. With the #1 goal often being data collection and reporting, the sales staff can be handed a messy, complicated interface that requires them to spend a significant chunk of their time messing with software instead of making sales.

Surveys have found that the average salesperson spends well over an hour per day inputting data into their CRM, with even basic data entries requiring more than 10 clicks to log.

For example:

Even after investing in implementing and customizing one of the leading CRMs, Foursquare’s staff needed to make 16 clicks just to log a single sales call.

16 clicks ... to log a single call.

When you multiply that by as many as 150 calls per day, PER REP, and then multiply that across teams with 20, 30, 50, 100+ reps, we’re talking about a massive amount of time wasted on simply logging calls.

While any software rollout will require some adjustment from the sales staff, ultimately, if the software isn’t built with them in mind, it’s more likely to fail.

3. Shady pricing models

Expensive CRMs are often pitched as an all-in-one solution for a company’s needs, but after everything is setup and the bill comes in, many businesses find themselves paying hidden feeds and unexpected costs.

It’s not uncommon for platforms to charge extra for popular features, important integrations, or even API usage. Both expected and unexpected costs of ownership are some of the most common complaints businesses have regarding their CRMs.

“Salesforce customers see a lot of hidden costs that could turn them away from renewing their contracts. For example, to create a sandbox environment, a popular feature for testing applications, Salesforce charges an additional 15% or more on top of its annual subscription fee. There are extra charges for additional integration and API usage too, Forrester says.

In fact, in a recent Forrester survey, 52% of the respondents picked 'high cost of ownership over time' as the one thing they most dislike about Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, followed by 'rigid and inflexible pricing model' at 42% of total. As a result, 43% of the respondents said they will 'renegotiate our contract with Salesforce when it comes up for renewal,' while 8% said they will move to a different vendor.”

4. Limited integration with popular software

The 4th issue we’ll discuss is the most straightforward. If your sales software doesn’t integrate with the other software you are using, the rollout won’t be successful.

While it is typically easy to ascertain compatibility beforehand, it’s not uncommon for integrations to have bugs or other issues, even when they do exist. It’s also possible that you will discover the need for additional integrations that don’t exist during rollout.

How sales software can double productivity

The best sales software doesn’t just drive strategy, it also makes things simpler for your sales staff. It solves all the problem we just talked about and allows your sales reps to spend their time contacting, qualifying, and closing sales.

Here’s how sales software can actually DOUBLE your productivity, instead of suffocating it.

1. Simple, low-cost setup & maintenance

On the one hand, a simple, low-cost setup beats a complicated, expensive setup any day of the week.

Duh.

On the other hand, most businesses are willing to absorb some upfront hassle if it means a long-term boost in productivity.

This is why ownership and maintenance costs are so important. The more often your system is down or being worked on, the less productive your team will be. The more times you need to hire a 3rd party to perform some massive infrastructure customization, the less productive your team will be.

When you're using a simple, essentially maintenance-free system, you never have to worry about losing productivity while you perform technical work on implementing or maintaining your CRM.

Michael Bassin, Chief Revenue Officer of FirstImpression.io, shared how the sales software you use can make all the difference.

“Naturally, the first CRM solution I checked out was Salesforce, since it's the most well known.  I signed up for a trial and used the software for a week. It was a disaster. While admittedly Salesforce can be a really great option if heavily customized, as a sales team of 1 I didn't have a budget to invest in some complex solution. I got so frustrated with working with Salesforce after the week that I started doing some research.

I found out about Close.io from a Quora group. I signed up for a trial, spoke to Kevin about the ins and outs, and was up and running within a day.”

2. Straightforward lead assignment

Thanks in part to the dynamic nature of digital marketing, leads reach the sales department with an increasingly diverse history.

• PPC ads
• Content marketing
• Social marketing
• Direct calls
• Partner referrals
• Contact forms
• Offline events
• Prior purchases
• Mobile opt-ins
• Etc.

Sorting through these leads, tracking their activity throughout your lead funnels, matching them to sales staff, and briefing salespeople on past activity are all functions that could occupy an entire team of administrators if it weren’t for sales software.

The best CRM platforms are designed to integrate smoothly with marketing software on the front end, allowing sales managers to easily import, sort, and assign leads to staff with an automatically included briefing on each lead’s history.

When done correctly, this allows the salesperson to sit down and begin contacting leads as simply as if they were working their way through an email inbox.

Scott Furlaud of Autobytel had the following comments after moving to Close.io:

“Close.io lets me assign my day-to-day tasks in great detail. I have all of my tasks in front of me and I know exactly what I need to do. Love the tasks! I never forget a thing using Close.io and nothing slips through the cracks!!”

While this may seem simple, that’s exactly what we want when attempting to increase productivity, and it’s sorely lacking from many of today’s CRMs. The simpler the better."

Michael Bassin of FirstImpression.io had this to add:

“Close.io has a really easy interface. It's very easy to import and export leads, create customized fields for different circumstances, and manage all different types of email templates. The layout is very clear and easy on the eyes and on the whole it ensures there is as little manual entry required as possible for the entire sales and post-sale experience. There's no doubt my team and I would be substantially less productive if we didn't have a system like Close.io in place.”

3. Better pipeline management & sales conversations

The primary methods for contacting leads today are phone calls and email, neither of which require particularly advanced software. Pull out any stock smartphone and you can do both without even needing to download an app.

Making the call or sending the email is the easy part, however. The more challenging part is tracking and recording that contact for the purposes of future review, training, and strategic adjustment.

As we’ve mentioned previously, many CRM rollouts fail because they aren’t built with the sales staff in mind.

The best sales software IS built with the salespeople in mind. It eliminates all of these issues by allowing email and phone contact directly through the platform and automatically recording and tracking every single activity, without the salesperson needing to do a thing.

Remember how Foursquare’s team had to log 16 clicks for every single sales call?

With Close.io, the exact same process only requires 2 clicks, which is just one of several big reasons why they were willing to go through the hassle of changing over to the Close.io CRM.

It also made training new sales reps a breeze:

“Whenever I tell this to colleagues, they can’t believe it. We spend less than an hour training our reps how to actually use Close.io. We have some SmartViews preset for each rep to make it easy to get started.

A lot of the training is actually about familiarizing them with our products and our workflows and systems, and not so much specifically about Close.io. Usually, on day four, they’re already making calls with Close.io.”

Marcus Franck of Franck Energy had the following to say:

"The way Close.io captures all customer communication and notes in one place. In our sector we have very long lead times so being able to go back and look at previous engagement with customers is essential.

The less the salesperson has to do on the administrative end, the more accurate the data and the more time they have to contact leads, which translates to more revenue."

Razvan Creanga of Hackajob had this to say about Close.io:

“Transparency is key for us. Close.io allows everyone to find what they need really quickly. It also helps with reporting, since you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Since transitioning from our own bespoke CRM to Close.io, we’ve seen a 100% increase in revenue.”

Jacob Garlick of Revsite shared the following:

“Revsite is completely focused on sales metrics. The number of dials our reps can make per day is a big deal for us. With Salesforce, the best we could do was 60 dials per day, and in order to break that barrier, we were going to need to purchase an add-on to the system that cost another $150 per month per rep.

With Close.io’s standard calling license, my reps can power dial 100+ leads per day. Since switching platforms, our average number of dials per day has doubled and revenue from our sales team has increased by 80%.”

4. Integrating marketing, sales & customer support data

While the first priority should always be helping your sales team make more calls and send more emails, you also want the ability to train your staff, refine your sales approach, and evolve your company strategy over time.

Data analysis is how you achieve this, but in order to accumulate usable data, you have to track everything from beginning to end—from marketing to sales to customer support.

This is impossible to do without integrated software, and that’s why integration is a fundamental part of any sales CRM worth its salt.

Ideally, you’ll have two main choices when it comes to connecting your CRM with other tools your company uses: via an out-of-the-box integration, or directly via the API to allow for more customization. Automatically creating custom reports, generating commission reports for your reps that match your comp plan, feeding data from other apps directly into Close.io, custom admin panels and much more can be accomplished with our API. Anything you can do from within Close.io, you can also do via our API.

It’s also important to have easy access to your data, with the ability to quickly sort, analyze, create reports. The best sales software will make both integration and reporting easy for your team.

Conclusion: Sales software doesn't have to suffocate productivity

As we’ve discussed, CRMs today can be a drain on a sales team’s productivity, but fortunately, you aren’t limited to those platforms.

Sales software like Close.io can drive a significant boost to your team’s productivity in the following ways:

1. Simple setup and maintenance
2. Straightforward lead assignment
3. Better pipeline management & sales conversations
4. Integrated data across departments

Get started with Close.io now to boost your productivity.

Recommended reading:

Customer case study: Foursquare
What to see how other companies are using Close.io? Here's how Foursquare, a local search & discovery mobile app, is using our sales CRM to manage their sales and increase productivity.

Customer case study: Instagram + Candid + Close.io = Millions in sales for this luxury furniture company 
Unlimited Furniture wanted to increase sales from their Instagram followers. With our sales CRM, their revenue increased 10% = millions in $$$. Here's how.

Sales productivity: How to make 300+ calls per day without a power dialer
Find out how to make 300+ calls a day without a power dialer, which will save you time and money.

Companies (and individual sales people) can and often do waste an awful amount of time, money and energy pursuing organisations that are never likely to buy - or, if they were to, are never likely to buy from your organisation.

Many marketers have jumped on the bandwagon of buyer personas over the past few years, but these are typically targeted at individual roles, and have served to conceal a potentially more important truth: companies have personas, too…

These personas are more important, and more complex, than a simple demographic segmentation based around company size, sector, location or function. Whilst demographics can provide an important foundation, in complex B2B sales environments there are many other factors that serve to define what an ideal customer looks like.

So what do we mean when we talk about an “Ideal Customer”? It’s an organisation that is likely to:

• Suffer from critical issues that you are really good at solving
• Be in the market now or in the future for your category of solution
• Be prepared to buy from an organisation like yours
• Turn into a good and profitable customer
• Evolve into a long-term strategic relationship

It should be obvious - as you reflect on your most attractive existing customers - that the common characteristics that unify these archetypal ideal customers go far beyond basic demographics.

For the tech-based businesses that I typically work with, there are usually three important additional ways of characterising these ideal customers: technographic, firmographic and situational. Let’s consider each of these in turn:

TECHNOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

For any tech-based business, the technologies that have already been adopted by the prospective customer are incredibly powerful indicators. For example, in the early days of SaaS solutions, it was very useful to know whether the organisation had already implemented any other SaaS based applications.

For many early-stage or scale-up vendors, it’s also important to know whether the prospect has a track record of acquiring similarly innovative best-of-breed solutions in other areas of the business, or whether they typically default to buying from an established vendor even if their solution turns out to be less advanced. This can help avoid investing large amounts of effort in an opportunity where you get selected as the “best” solution but then get rejected when it comes it final approval.

Of course, you may be selling technology that works best or is most easily integrated with certain other systems, but knowing what existing technology is in use can also be a useful proxy for the stage of development of the prospective customer - different platforms tend to be associated with start-up, scale-up and mature IT environments.

FIRMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of organisational personas is what I’ll refer to as “firmographic” characteristics. For example, do your most attractive customers tend to be:

• Start-up, scale-up or mature organisations?
• Market leaders, challenger brands, or one of many players?
• Early adopters, innovators, in the mainstream or laggards?
• Seen as reference points for other companies in their sector?
• Centralised or decentralised decision-makers?
• Focused on new business or their on existing customers?
• Primarily B2B or B2C focused?

You’ll almost certainly - if you analyse your existing customer base hard enough - find other common characteristics. There will probably be just a handful that turn out to be particularly important indicators.

SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

Demographic, technographic and firmographic characteristics can help to establish who your most attractive long-term prospects are - but it’s their situational characteristics that indicate whether they could be ready to implement your solution today.

Situational characteristics are associated with recent changes in your potential customer’s internal or external environment. These changes act as trigger events - they help the organisation to recognise that their current environment may not enable them to master their current and future challenges, and spark the recognition that it could be time to take action.

Common trigger events include:

• A change in senior management
• A new round of investment
• A merger or acquisition
• A new corporate initiative
• Launching a new product or entering a new market
• Accelerated headcount growth or staff turnover
• The introduction of new regulation or legislation
• Changes in the competitive environment

Once again, if you carefully analyse your recent wins and losses and survey your most attractive existing customers, you’ll inevitably uncover some patterns that can help identify when a prospective customer might be ripe for change.

INVEST IN YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

Whilst these indicators are incredibly valuable, they typically can’t be established simply by buying-in basic demographically organised databases or mailing lists. You can identify some of these factors through some of the better business intelligence services. But at the end of the day, there is no substitute for knowing what you are looking for and doing your own research.

PUTTING THE PROFILES TO USE

Creating your ideal customer profiles needs to be a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. It’s critically important that everyone agrees what sort of organisations your company should be targeting. Once you have that common understanding:

• Marketing can more effectively target their thought leadership, database building and pipeline building efforts
• Sales can more effectively qualify the right opportunities early on in the sales cycle, and implement the appropriate sales strategies
• Everyone can spend their time, money and resources more effectively
• You will see a direct positive impact on true pipeline value, sales cycle length, average deal value and sales win rates

What’s not to like? By the way, I think you'll also appreciate this guide to value selling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

As one of the most formidable mobile marketing tactics – one that’s used heavily by companies like Coca-Cola and Target – there’s much we can learn from the concept of communicating with clients by text.

On the surface, text message marketing and direct mail would appear to have little in common – after all, they spring from two distinctly different marketing camps: digital and print. But the truth is that these advertising platforms share one highly notable quality. They’re both proven and powerful promotional channels that many business owners are reluctant to adopt.

Here are three things we can learn from text message marketing that may just boost the benefits of your direct mail campaign.

1. Offers That Resonate

In the world of SMS, a call-to-action that’s short, clear, and concise in both message and incentive is one of the keys to driving opt-ins, and converting text viewers into subscribers. That same rule should apply to the content of your company’s direct mail postcards. Your offer is what gives clients and prospects a good reason to respond, and to accomplish that task it must be:

• personalized,
• timely,
• engaging,
• exclusive, and
• easy to act on

For best results, always make sure that your direct mail marketing goals align with your overall business objectives. And include a trackable element in your offer – a unique reference code, for example – that will allow you to determine whether those goals are being met.

2. Value in Reminders

Mobile marketers recognize that texting appointment reminders to clients can decrease the number of no-shows by more than 35%. A similar degree of value can be yours when you create direct mail materials that are designed to remind your customers of who you are, and what you can do for them.

Research has suggested that “really good ad mail” helps to keep the sender’s brand top-of-mind for nearly two-thirds of consumers. And in much the same way that promotional texts have a significantly higher open rate than emails, direct mail is more than twice as likely to be noticed and read by customers than email marketing messages.

3. Leveraging the All-Mighty Coupon

When it comes to designing your marketing campaign, it’s important to keep your personal feelings out of the mix, and focus on proven results. Mobile coupons, for example, have been shown to play an enormous role in re-marketing to an audience based on redemption behavior. And in the case of direct mail:

• studies indicate that printed materials like coupons are kept for 17 days on average – providing the ideal environment for repeat brand exposure
• direct mail coupons tend to outperform digital in driving in-store traffic by anywhere from 10-30%
• 87% of all consumers use print coupons they receive in the mail, with more than 2.5 billion of these having been redeemed in 2015 alone

If you’ve been reluctant to invest in direct mail postcard-coupons in the past, remember that you are not your customer: even if you don’t enjoy receiving these enticing and practical offers at home, chances are good that your clients do.

Have you been putting off an important-but-difficult conversation? Perhaps you just can’t bring yourself to share some negative feedback with a peer. Or maybe you are hesitant to admit to something you did wrong. Either way, your dread is probably growing over time as you imagine worse and worse scenarios for how the conversation will play out. Carrying an issue without resolution is like carrying debt. You’ll eventually have to pay the principal (by having the difficult conversation), but the longer you wait, the more interest you’ll pay in anxiety and dread.

If the idea of having to pay anxiety interest isn’t enough, consider the other reasons to have the difficult conversation sooner rather than later. First, the longer you put off the conversation, the more obscured the facts will become. Without objective examples, the conversation is more likely to stray into emotional and judgmental territory. That will make it more excruciating than if you can stick to the facts.

Also, as you get further out from the events in question, the conversation will get more awkward. Feedback delivered well after the fact is likely to yield a response of “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Similarly, if you put off admitting guilt, your failure to come clean quickly might allow things to get further off track and create a bigger hole to dig out of. Delaying might also look like you were covering something up. In any case, waiting to share a difficult message can erode trust in a relationship, whereas sharing a difficult message before it snowballs can enhance trust.

You and Your Team Series

Difficult Conversations

As salespeople, we are competitive by nature. We relish pitch-offs with our fiercest competitors, and take pride in our ability to come out on top. Finding a way to add value to our prospects’ lives and convincing them to sign on the dotted line is a rush.

That’s why there’s nothing more disheartening and degrading than when a sale simply turns into a pricing war. We’ve all been there: the competitor offers a 10% discount, so you have to offer 15%. Now they’re throwing in 2 free seats a month, so you need to make sure that you can give them 3. Yuck.

The biggest problem is that this type of pricing war has a snowball effect. Once it starts, your discounts will just keep getting bigger until you’re the last, cheapest vendor standing. Where’s the fun in that? Here are three tips to help you avoid this nightmare before it has a chance to begin.

Know the types of leads generating value for your business.

When leads are just a name in a list of hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, it’s hard to know what you’re going to get. Because of this, reps will often just start at the top of a list and work their way down. So how do you know what makes one lead better than another? And how do you help your team prioritize and focus on the leads that will drive the most value for your business?

Lead yield is just one example of a Yield Measure – measures that are used to understand how much value you get in return for your investments at each stage of the sales pipeline. The equation for lead yield is as follows: Sales Revenue / # of Leads Generated.

To help you understand what sets one lead apart from another and identify the types of leads generating the most value for your business, you want to segment your deals by lead profile dimensions like those listed below, and measure their lead yield:
– Lead source (paid search, partners, social advertising, organic search, etc.)
– Company industry (media, travel, financial services, eCommerce, etc.)
– Solutions already in use (HubSpot, Datanyze, Yesware, etc.)

Completing this exercise should hopefully start to uncover qualities that high-yielding leads have in common, so that your reps can prioritize these in their efforts and lower their risk of getting caught in discount battles. You can see an example of a yield comparison for leads from two different sources below. For a more detailed breakdown of how to use lead yield, check out this blog post.

Leverage the right content at the right moments.

The idea behind this tip is that it will help you engage in value-based selling. Value-based selling is a sales tactic that requires reps to fully understand their prospects’ problems and clearly establish the value of solving them.

When done well, content can help facilitate this entire process by highlighting and helping buyers relate to key issues solved by your product. It should shine a light on the risk of doing nothing to solve these problems or going with lesser alternative solutions. Good content also makes the value of solving these problems (with your product, of course) clear and concise.

The benefit here is two-fold:
1) When done early and effectively, this approach enables reps to establish the benefits that their solution brings as the key decision-making criteria for their prospects. When something is perceived as extremely high value, price becomes a non-issue.
2) If you really can’t identify a key problem where your solution can provide solid value, it’s best to qualify out and avoid the impending pricing war. Because that’s where this type of sale will go.

Don’t let deals linger in your sales pipeline.

While sales cycle length can vary based on customer and deal size, every business should have a general idea of the average time a deal should sit in the sales pipeline, or better yet, in each individual pipeline stage. This should be enough time to identify problems, adequately present your solution, do some negotiating, etc.

But when deals start to linger in your pipeline and show little to no movement, this is a warning sign. Either they don’t see enough value in your solution to consider it an urgent need, or they’re evaluating other options – both of which are bad news.

To help combat this, it’s important to have a clearly defined sales process in place that outlines the exact steps reps need to take to move a deal from one pipeline stage to the next. This process should be measured optimized over time as you and your team figure out the information and activities needed to most effectively close deals.

To help spot potential problem areas and keep you in the know about any lingering deals, leverage a report like the one below. This stage duration analysis not only shows how much time, on average, deals are spending in each pipeline stage, but it also calculates the probability of winning a deal based on how much time it has been in a particular stage.

Step Away from the Discounts

When you take part in the pricing war, nobody wins. Avoid your mortal enemy with these three tips to ensure that your solution is top of mind and top value for your prospects.

Ending your first email to a prospect with a question gets their mental gears turning, demonstrates your subject matter expertise, and helps kick off a meaningful conversation.

Perhaps most importantly, it makes your message memorable. The Zeigarnik effect states that people fixate on unfinished tasks -- so leaving a question dangling in your prospect’s mind causes them to think about your email long after they’ve read it.

What should you ask buyers? Great question. These seven options will help you end prospecting emails on a strong note.

If you're more of a visual learner, click here to jump straight to the infographic we created with 24Slides.

7 Questions to Use in Prospecting Sales Emails

1. “Would you like to learn about the opportunity I think [prospect’s competitor] is missing out on?”

Nothing is more interesting than competitive intelligence. The buyer doesn’t know if you have real insights to offer -- but they’ll want to get on the phone to find out.

Citing another player in your prospect’s space also proves you’re not spraying and praying, since this email could only apply to them.

2. “I see [prospect’s company] uses [X strategy]. Why?”

Not only will you learn valuable information about why the buyer is using a specific approach, you’ll also make them wonder if you know about a better way.

3. “I see [prospect’s company] isn’t investing in [Y area]. Why not?”

This question is a variation on #2. The response will tell you whether your prospect doesn’t know about the opportunity, is unsure how to capitalize on it, or doesn’t have the resources to do anything about it.

No matter the answer, you’re in a good position to help. Prove the opportunity is worth their time, help them create a plan, or show them how your product makes it far simpler to execute.

4. “Is [likely challenge or opportunity] a priority for [prospect’s boss]?”

Use LinkedIn to discover to whom your prospect reports (or to whom their boss reports). Do some digging to identify their top initiatives -- maybe they wrote a blog post discussing their current focus, spoke at a webinar about their success in an area, or belong to a niche community.

Use this intel to craft your question. Your prospect will be eager to learn if you can help them impress their boss.

5. “Do you want to get on a call with [expert within your company] to discuss [prospect’s business focus]?”

Offer to connect your recipient with an internal expert. For example, if she works in Sales Operations, you might write:

“Our Sales Ops senior manager recently built a new lead scoring program from the ground up. Do you want to get on a call with him to discuss Clearize’s lead score strategy?”

You’ll immediately distinguish yourself from the other reps trying to win time on her calendar to talk about their product -- unlike them, you’re adding value from the get-go.

Of course, you won’t be able to do this for every deal, so save it for important accounts and hard-to-reach prospects.

6. “Have you considered trying [X technique]?”

If you know of an easy fix for your prospect, suggest it in your first email. They’ll feel indebted to you for your help -- which starts the relationship off on strong footing and makes them likelier to listen to your future suggestions.

Wondering what this might look like in practice? Suppose you sell an event hosting platform. Your prospect runs two-plus events per week, but you’ve noticed he doesn’t promote them beyond email. You might ask, “Have you considered advertising your webinars on Twitter? One of my clients doubled attendance with less than $500 of sponsored tweets.”

7. “Should I save a [seat, ticket] for you?”

My coworker received an email letting him know a webinar he may be interested in was nearly full. The salesperson asked if he’d like her to save him a seat.

Although my coworker wasn’t planning on attending, discovering how popular the webinar was changed his mind.

Use this question to incite the fear of missing out in your prospect. The offer doesn’t need to be about a webinar -- you could ask if they’d like a spot saved in your organization’s networking event, online community, conference, workshop, and so on.

Once you’ve made the connection, you can learn more about the buyer’s needs and objections and craft an appropriate pitch.

You might think you put your customers first, but how customer-focused would your clients rate you on a scale of one to 10? And when was the last time you asked?

In a study by Bain & Company, nearly 95 percent of companies surveyed claimed to put customer service at the forefront, while 80 percent maintained they provide a superior level of service. Shockingly, a mere eight percent of those companies’ customers agreed. And, as the old saying goes, the customer is always right. So how can you determine, without a doubt, if the customer experience you provide measures up to your core customers’ expectations?

The answer may seem simple enough: You ask them. But knowing what your customers think about your brand isn’t enough. If you truly want to enhance your customer experience, even if you think it already meets your company’s standards, you need to discover how to use their feedback to make the necessary improvements.

If your company maintains both an online and offline presence, it can prove challenging to bridge the feedback between the two to create a seamless customer feedback loop. Luckily, it’s not impossible. Once you understand how a customer feedback loop should work, you can use the following three offline-to-online feedback improvement strategies to help boost your customer-centricity and deliver an experience your customers will appreciate.

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How customer-focused would your clients rate you on a scale of 1 to 10? When's the last time you asked?
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Deconstructing the Customer Feedback Loop

Creating a solid customer feedback loop requires more than customer insight. To complete the cycle, you not only need to know what your customers have to say about your brand, but also how to use their feedback to maintain your strong points and strengthen your weak ones. Typically, most businesses solicit some form of customer feedback, such as surveys, reviews, and testimonials. But how you collect this information from offline customers isn’t as easy or efficient as it is with your online buyers.

When an online customer conducts business with you, it’s acceptable to request a name, email address, or (for shipping or billing purposes) a physical address, which helps you trace each purchase or download to a particular person. As a result, you can directly segment each customer that fits in your predefined customer feedback loop parameters to gain their insight on their experience with your business.

That’s not the case with your offline crowd. You can’t identify the people walking through your door by their name, email address, and purchase history, nor do you know if this is their first or fifteenth experience with your brand.

Your online and offline customers are not always one in the same, but that does not mean you can’t include each set into the same customer feedback loop. And since it’s far easier—and more sensical—to ask your offline customers for online feedback than the other way around, take a look at these three strategies that can help you seal the gaps in the customer feedback loop, no matter how your customer chooses to do business with you.

1. Make Data Collection a Daily Transactional Practice

To begin a successful migration of offline-to-online customer feedback, you first need to know how to contact your buyers. Ask each customer for their name and email address as part of the checkout process, but don’t ask for an entire personal profile. You can always ask for more information if they participate in your customer feedback loop.

One important caveat to mention here: You don’t want to force your customers to provide their personal information. If customers are not willing to share their contact details, then it’s likely they won’t want to participate in your feedback initiatives.

Once you have collected the customer’s data, send them a welcome or thank you email, along with a CTA to participate in a survey about their purchase experience. You can offer incentives, like a cash prize for a few lucky respondents, to increase engagement.

Your initial email can potentially trigger an entire customer lifecycle campaign that periodically requests feedback, either based on subsequent purchases or elapsed time from the first purchase or a variety of other factors. Above all, asking for feedback should never be a one-time occurrence. If you truly care what your customers have to say, make sure you ask them often.

2. Offer Multiple Customer Feedback Loops

To create a successful feedback initiative, you should ask for customer insight in as many ways as possible. The common goal is to get offline responses into an online platform. If you can’t collect customer data in store, you can gain their input via other outlets.

Online Surveys

Add a QR Code or custom URL to each receipt that directs the customer to a quick survey about their experience. It streamlines the feedback process for the customer and offers neat-and-tidy analytics for your review.

Reviews

Ask customers to leave you a review on your social channels or website, either verbally, on their receipt, or via store signage. Even better, create a printed handout that provides clear instructions for leaving a review on your customer’s favorite review websites.

In-App In-Store Feedback

If you offer an app, give your customers a reason to use it while in the store. Target’s wildly successful app, Cartwheel, gives patrons extra savings on items by scanning the barcodes at the checkouts. You can promote special discounts, coupons, digital shopping lists, product reviews, or other incentives only available via the app/store combo in exchange for customer data and feedback in real time.

3. Broadcast Your Online Touchpoints

Your online customers already know how to find you in the digital world, so make sure your offline ones do, too. If you engage in social media, make sure you promote your various channels to your in-person audience. Give them reasons to seek out additional information about your brand and where they can find it. Encourage them to post pictures or success stories using a product they bought from you, let them know how they can contact you for customer service, or offer your website address for online ordering.

The Last Step in Refining Your Customer Feedback Loop

None of the above strategies can completely close the customer feedback loop until you decide to use that feedback to make changes. Seeing how only eight percent of the customers in the survey mentioned earlier agree that they feel like the number one priority, there’s a good chance you have plenty of opportunities to hone your customer experience.

Once you collect your data and decide how to reorganize your strategy, make sure you let your customers know about it. Compile mass feedback into a report, and share it with everyone on your email list. Above all, be sure to explain that because of their opinions, you now offer the level of service they expect. You can be sure they will thank you for it.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

This is a guest contribution from Jawad Khan.

If you’re serious about blogging, I’m sure you’re already building an email list (or planning to do so)

Since you’re a Problogger reader, I’m also assuming your knowledge and expertise in blogging is significantly higher than most newbies.

So you’re well-aware that “Get Free Email Updates”, that beautiful sign up form in your blog’s side-bar, isn’t an attractive incentive for potential subscribers anymore, right?

No one wants to subscribe to another email list just to pile up more junk in their email inbox.

Don’t get me wrong.

Email is still the best way to build a relationship with your audience and turn them into paying clients.

Studies suggest that 66% of online consumers in the US aged over 15 made a purchase as a direct result of marketing emails.

Source: Quicksprout

Another study suggests that 54% of online buyers that abandon a shopping cart, but are reminded again via email, will complete the purchase. According to a recently published report by email Monday, email marketing has an ROI of 3800% ($38 in return for every $1 spent)

Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it has become more important for bloggers, marketers and eCommerce businesses.

But since everyone’s trying to squeeze email addresses out of their blog visitors, people have become more guarded about their contact information and only sahre it away when they see clear value in return.

This is why most marketers use lead magnets for list building.

But it’s 2017, so you need to be a bit more creative and find new ways to effectively deliver your lead magnet to your audience and persuade them to join your list.

Not sure how to do it?

Let me share 3 list building techniques that you’ll see many smart marketers use in the coming months.

1. Host a Virtual Summit to Steal Subscribers from Industry Influencers

You’ve read expert round-up posts, right?

Turn them into video content and you have yourself a high quality virtual summit.

Virtual summits have been around for a while but the concept really picked up in late 2015. Throughout the last year, I’ve seen hundreds of influencers in dozens of different industries participate in virtual summits, skyrocket their email lists and fill their pockets to the top.

It’s one of the fastest ways to not only build an email list but also to enhance your brand image and influence in your niche.

You might have seen banners like this one in your Facebook newsfeed in the last few months.

Here’s how it works

• The summit host picks a very specific topic for the summit (e.g email list building or Amazon self-publishing, Shopify dropshipping etc.)
• He decides the dates and the duration of the summit (usually 4-5 days)
• The host gathers 15-20 experts on the topic and conducts video interviews (live or recorded) with each one of them
• Every expert who is interviewed has the option to promote a paid offer or a lead magnet during or after the interview (a link to the offer is also published on the interview page)
• All the experts promote the event to their own email subscribers. For example if a virtual summit has 10 experts with 1000 subscribers each, it is promoted to 10,000 people. This creates a pool of potential subscribers for all the participants.
• The host gets all the subscribers that opt-in to watch the event live.
• Once the live event is over, the host can sell the recorded event as a paid product or a lead magnet.

Sounds simple, right?

Hosting a high-quality virtual summit can be expensive and technically challenging.

Which is why only the top influencers in most industries are currently using it for email list building.

But no one’s stopping the lesser known bloggers from doing it.

If you can’t get A-list experts to join your event, look for the second-tier experts who have a loyal following but are looking to expand their reach. You’ll find them in every industry.

If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, use free tools like Google Hangouts to record your interviews, use any WordPress landing page plugin to create landing pages for the event and get the job done.

In short, if you get it right, a virtual summit can literally give you thousands of subscribers overnight.

2. Use Facebook Live Videos To Build Your List in No Time

Facebook Live has spread like wildfire

Studies show that Facebook is getting more than 8 billion video views every day and users are spending 3x more time watching live videos as compared to the recorded ones.

Source: Facebook Video Statistics 2016

The top influencers and experts in almost every industry are using Facebook Live to get closer to their audience, engage with them more frequently, and strengthen their personal brand by answering the most burning questions of their followers.

Darren himself does regular “Ask Me Anything” sessions using Facebook Live.

As I said, the user-engagement level on Facebook Live is much greater than recorded content. And it’s always easier to persuade an engaged audience to take action. Which is why Facebook Live presents the prefect opportunity to route viewers to your email list.

How to do it?

Just ask them.

Really, that’s all it takes.

Create a free resource like an eBook or checklist, which is relevant to the topic of your live video, place it on a landing page to collect emails, and ask users to download it during your Facebook Live session.

Also add the landing page link as a pinned comment on your video, and to the video description so that viewers can download it even when you’re not live.

Amy Porterfield used this exact strategy to get hundreds of subscribers to her email list.

Facebook Live videos currently enjoy additional organic reach, so this is the best time to use it to build your email list.

3. Include Laser-Focused Content Upgrades in Your Guest Posts To Open Floodgates of Subscribers

Guest blogging is one of my favorite ways to drive traffic and find subscribers.

In the last 3 years, I’ve written over 500 guest posts on some of the most widely followed marketing and SEO blogs on the web, generating thousands of email subscribers.

But many bloggers struggle to generate any traction from their guest posts.

Do you know why?

Because they rely on the good old author bio links to send them subscribers. Many others simply link to their homepage and hope people would subscribe to their list.

That’s not how it works.

Bloggers that generate hundreds of subscribers from every guest post do 2 things really well.

• They write super quality guest posts with lots of actionable insights
• They create laser-focused content upgrades used within the body content. Most editors have no problem allowing this as long as the post offers real value to the readers.

Not sure what a content upgrade is?

It’s a post specific lead magnet that offers something additional to the readers of a blog post.

Brian Dean (Backlinko) increased his sign up rate by 785% by adding a content upgrade to this post.

Insane!

Bryan Harris shared this detailed case study of how one blogger generated thousands of email signups to his blog by combining content upgrades with guest blogging

They work in all niches.

For example, if you’ve written a blog post “7 Healthy and Safe Weight-Loss Tips for First Time Moms” you could create a checklist on “23 Healthy Foods You Should Eat While Losing Weight” and use it as a content upgrade.

Content upgrades work so well because, unlike generic lead magnets, they are targeted towards an engaged reader who is already interested in the topic.

They’re so effective for lead generation that many leading email marketing tools now have separate features to create content upgrades and add them to your blog posts.

SumoMe, for example, introduced a new two-step pop-up for content upgrades that has been tested to increase signups by 200-300% in some cases.

But when you’re guest blogging, you don’t have access to the tools used by the host blog. So you should simply link to the landing page of your content upgrade from where users can opt-in and subscribe to your list.

Wrapping Up

Email list building is more important for bloggers than ever before. It is the only channel that gives you direct and uninterrupted access to your reader’s inbox, and allows you to focus on long-term relationship building.

The tips I’ve shared in this post are already being used by some of the best marketers on the web. Making them a part of your list building strategy will surely help you attract more relevant and engaged subscribers.

What list building techniques are you applying to your blog right now?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Jawad Khan is a content marketing consultant and a freelance blogger for hire. Follow him on his blog Writing My Destiny, Twitter, and Google+.

The post 3 Email List Building Techniques You Need To Use in 2017 appeared first on ProBlogger.

Effective content marketing. It’s what we’re all striving for as marketers. To be able to produce high-quality leads for our sales teams via search engine optimisation instead of spending our hard-earned marketing budgets on search engine marketing.

Companies worldwide continue to invest billions of dollars per year in paid search lead generation. 2016 revenues, according to eMarketer, was forecast at $542.55 billion.

However, when comparing paid search to content marketing effectiveness, efficiency and ROI, it is no contest.

Effective content marketing wins hands down.

But before we jump in, I want you to bear these stats in mind:

• The first position on Google search results has a 34.36% click-through on desktop and a 31.35% rate on mobile (Advanced Web Ranking, 2015)

• For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them (Econsultancy, 2016)

• 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search (Google, 2015)

• 55% of B2B marketers say they are unclear on what content marketing success or effectiveness looks like (Content Marketing Institute, 2015)

• 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Demand Gen Report, 2016)

The following is a look at several primary reasons why you should invest time and resources in content marketing, rather than paid search alone.

The Cost Comparison

The investment in producing effective content marketing is the allocation of your time. In contrast, you must dedicate both advertising dollars and your time – a lot of it – in paid search. Yes, you can outsource it, but that just adds to the overall cost.

The costs for lead generation through content marketing are 38 percent of costs through paid search.

The recurring value of well-executed content is one reason for the lower cost structure. After you invest in the development of content, it continues to perform as long as you reach your audience.

In fact, Hubspot claims that 75 percent of their blog views and 90 percent of their blog leads come from old posts.

In contrast, you pay for search campaigns every time someone clicks through on your ad. The costs occur for each click-through regardless of whether the lead pans out.

Lead Generation Results

Not only does it cost less, but the ability to drive leads with content is much higher than with paid search.

On a dollar-for-dollar basis, content marketing investments generate three times more sales leads than you get through paid search. Kapost in partnership with Oracle put together a great eBook called “Content Marketing ROI”, details of which are at the end of this post. I highly advise you to read it.

Take a look at this image from the ebook:

When you combine the relatively low costs and the much stronger results, the return on investment for content marketing stands head-and-shoulders above ROI for paid search.

The People Factor

The value of content marketing extends beyond a simple comparison of financial results. It is also important to realise the influence that compelling content has in motivating people to react to your messages.

An inspired, qualified lead is more likely to convert. In the current search-driven era, people have a genuine interest in learning about companies and products through content.

In fact, 70 percent of those surveyed indicated just that, as shown via this infographic from MDG Advertising.

Also, 68 percent of people said they would read content produced by a brand that interested them.

Other interesting stats about how people respond to content marketing include:

• 78 percent of individuals believe that quality content signals that a company wants to build a healthy relationship (Neil Patel)
• 73 percent of us prefer genuine content for information over paid advertising (Neil Patel)
• 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement (Content Marketing Institute)
• 69 percent trust brand content
• 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Demand Gen Report, 2016)
• 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders (Demand Gen Report, 2016)

Wrap Up

On both a financial and influence basis, effective content marketing outperforms paid search advertising.

The costs of investment are much lower, and the lead generation results are three times greater. The downside is that it takes longer to achieve those results.

Plus, the data demonstrates to us that, it is consistent and clear that people value quality content, and use it to develop an affinity for particular brands.

However, that does not mean that you should substitute one for the other. Over time, your content marketing can negate the need for some paid search terms and will come into its own.

For further reading, check out this PDF from Kapost & Oracle called “Content Marketing ROI”. It is an excellent read.

I get so weary about the endless drivel about the “Death Of Sales.”

Ironically, I never see a post from customers/buyers—even procurement—about the death of sales, though I’m sure many would appreciate it (a variant of “What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean” joke —If you don’t know the answer, it’s “A good start!) Al the posts seem to come from sales “gurus” and technology suppliers, perhaps foreshadowing their own demise.

What’s killing sales isn’t the buyer. It isn’t their ability to self educate, to engage other buyers in social conversations, or even to process their buying transaction electronically.

What’s killing sales is the inability, perhaps unwillingness to respond to the way buyers are buying. Like every job in every industry, the work that needs to be done by sales professionals has changed profoundly. However, unlike most other roles, sales people seem unwilling to do the work that needs to be done.

What’s killing sales is sales people and leaders unwilling to do the work of selling!

Rather than change, adapt, and respond to what buyers really need, and the value we can create in helping them buy, too many are stuck in the same old methods.

We know and encourage buyers to self educate on the web. Yet sales people constantly focus on pitching their products.

We know customers struggle with buying, yet none of our programs or activities focus on helping them learn how to buy, or helping them align the diverse interests in the buying group.

We know people buy from people, yet we create assembly line/transactional processes. We focus on maximizing sales efficiency rather than buying effectiveness.

We know that we have to research, prepare. We have the capability and tools to deeply personalize every contact, every email, every interaction. We know buyers crave relevance. Yet the majority of our marketing and sales programs are far from this, instead focusing on volume/velocity.

We know they new buyer engagement requires new skills and competencies. But how many of our sales training programs focus on curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, value creation (Only one that I’ve seen in my experience). Instead, we focus on the 101 creative email headers, or 2056 ways of closing a sale.

We know we have to create and deliver value to our customers, but few sales people start with trying to understand what customers value.

We know, we know, we know……. Yet we remain fully committed to what worked yesterday, but no longer is even relevant to buyers today.

If we have a growing global economy, if we have an economy of any sort—-there will always be buying (that’s kind of a fundamental of economics). And buyers struggle with buying! If there is buying, there will always be a need for selling!

It is not changes in how customers want to buy that is killing sales.

It is the unwillingness and inability of sales professionals to change the way they sell that will kill sales.

Something will sweep in to do that function, customers still need the help. Why not make it sales?

Why You’re Wrong about Phone Scripts

By Mike Brooks, www.MrInsideSales.com 

Next week, I’ll be presenting two breakout sessions at the Microsoft sponsored AA-ISP’s Leadership Summit in Chicago. If you’re going to that event, make sure and email me so we can meet during the conference: Info@MrInsideSales.com 

You can read more about the event here. 

I’m going to be presenting both sessions centered on the importance of having and using best practice scripts (one B2B and one B2C session). What I find interesting is the mixed reaction I still get when I speak to some sales leaders about the use of scripts. 

Some obviously get the importance of having a standardized, best practice approach set of scripts to train and measure their reps against, while some others don’t think their reps should use a script. They think they’ll sound too much like a telemarketer or that their sale is too “consultative” for them to follow a script. 

Here’s what I tell them: First, all your reps are already using a script. If you don’t believe me, then just record them for a week, transcribe what they’re saying, and then what will you have? You’ll have a script of what they say, day in and day out! 

But, I tell them, you’ll also have ten or fifteen different versions of what should be a best practice “story” you’re telling about your company, product, and service. This is because most sales reps are winging it and ad-libbing their way through their sales presentations. 

And that is why they are struggling and not consistently making their revenue numbers. 

The solution to this is straight forward: Take the message your top producers are delivering, combine that with a standardized “best practice” approach, script it out, and then have your team use that scripting until they have internalized it and are consistently delivering your best messaging. 

Once I explain it that way, they suddenly realize what I mean when I tell them they are all wrong about phone scripts. 

In fact, when you have and follow a scripted approach, you will be: 

More confident during your pitch

You’ll be able to listen because you won’t be thinking up what you should say next

You’ll be able to qualify your leads to identify real buyers

Your presentations will run smoother because you’ll be engaging your prospects

Objections will be easier to deal with and overcome

You’ll make more sales and actually look forward to coming to work! 

And many, many other benefits. 

Bottom line: I’ve been training inside sales reps for over 30 years, and I know what works and what doesn’t. Scripts work – ad-libbing doesn’t. It’s that simple. 

If you would like to know more, then book a flight to Chicago and join me next week. It would be good to see you! 

Do you have an underperforming inside sales team?  Talk to Mike to see how he can help you and your team reach your revenue goals.  To learn more about Mike, visit his website: http://www.MrInsideSales.com

A bad buying process can beat a good salesperson. The way to increase your odds of winning is to control the process by gaining agreement on the commitments you need to win–and do your best work.

The post The Buyer’s Process Will Beat You – Episode 88 appeared first on The Sales Blog.

There’s no doubt that Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is hot right now. According to HubSpot's State of Marketing Report, more than 67% of brands are leveraging it in 2020.

ABM has been top of mind for several years, but the many businesses (SMBs in particular) have yet to implement any formal ABM strategy.

Why? Because companies get stuck. Of all the steps involved with starting an ABM strategy, the one that usually stops people in their tracks is picking the best target accounts.

But, it doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, equipped with the right approach, marketing and sales teams can pick their accounts together in as little as an hour.

Picking the wrong targets will make it hard for sales and marketing to align and will lead to poor financial results.

On the other hand, picking target accounts correctly is critical to the success of ABM campaigns. The right targets will lead to better account engagement, faster deal velocity, and larger deals. What’s not to like? 

Here are the steps to choose the right accounts for ABM campaigns.

• Identify your goals
• Identify accounts that will add credibility to your brand
• Look for accounts with an ideal customer profile (ICP)
• Consider picking accounts based on deal acceleration opportunities
• Build a data-driven account-targeting strategy
• Get insights on contacts to shorten sales cycles
• Get access to decision makers with market insights

How to Choose Target Accounts for Account-Based Marketing 

1. Identify your goals.

The first (and most critical) step to picking target accounts is to start with your campaign goals:  What is the business objective that closing these target accounts would help achieve? Once the business objective is identified and mutually agreed upon by marketing and sales, it becomes much easier to select the right accounts to focus on.

There are many reasons you may choose to purchase an account-based strategy. We’ll do a brief overview of the most common reasons first. Then, we’ll go into deeper detail on three of those. Let’s dive in! 

• Land and expand: The goal of this type of campaign is to grow by closing a deal with a subsidiary and then use them as a jumping off point to other buying units. Here, it’d make sense to pick target accounts that have multiple buying units or subsidiaries.
• Logo acquisition: Buyers - particularly upmarket/enterprise buyers - crave social proof. As a company grows, they may need brand-name logos on their website or brands that are well known in a particular industry/market. They’d be wise to identify and target these brand-name companies with a bespoke account strategy.
• Wake the dead: A closed-lost deal need not be the end of a relationship. After a year or two has passed, it’s common for buyer requirements and product capabilities to grow and change. An ABM campaign is an excellent way to re-engage big prospects who went with another solution and educate them about what’s changed since their decision. The best part? You’re usually familiar with at least one member of the buying committee. Tip: Keep renewal cycles in mind before initiating your campaign.
• Targeting best-fit accounts: Sometimes the goal of an ABM campaign can be as simple as focusing more attention on best fit accounts to drive better engagement, deal size, deal velocity, and close rate. For this type of campaign, it’s best to use an automated Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) workflow to flag best-fit companies. We’ll go into more detail on this approach below.
• Upsell, cross-sell, or renewal: As most sales reps can attest, it’s often easier to sell more to an existing customer than to close an entirely new customer. If sales and marketing have identified major upsell/cross-sell opportunity from a distinct set of customers, the team can mark them as target accounts and run coordinated campaigns to educate the customers.
• Deal acceleration: Coordination between marketing and sales not only helps deals get created more quickly, but it can also help buyers make decisions more quickly. For this campaign, each company associated with the deal you want to accelerate would be a target account.

2. Identify accounts that will add credibility to your brand.

Of all the reasons to pick target accounts, this one is probably the easiest to understand and implement. The goal of this campaign is to close deals with target accounts whose logos and testimonials would add legitimacy and social proof to your brand. This strategy is often called, "logo acquisition."

To get started with a logo acquisition campaign, Sales and Marketing leaders should ask themselves two questions: 

• Is there a segment of the business in which we could be growing faster but are losing deals because buyers don’t recognize our customers or see us as “legitimate” for their needs?
• Which brands have the most name recognition and respect among that segment of buyers?

Having answered those questions, identify 10 to 15 companies that match that criteria, mark them as target accounts, and create a campaign for engaging them.

3. Look for accounts with an ideal customer profile (ICP).

Define your ideal customer profiles with HubSpot's ABM software.

For teams willing to invest in some upfront analysis, building an “ideal customer profile” can help identify target accounts. Teams with a marketing automation tool can even flag best-fit companies automatically with tailored workflows.

An ideal customer profile like the company version of an individual buyer persona. It’s a collection of the characteristics (e.g. industry, company size, technographics, location) that define the type of company that is an ideal fit for your products or services. Usually, team members have an intuitive idea for what that profile should look like, but it can be worth taking some time (about a week or two) to analyze the common characteristics of your largest deals and most successful customers. Need convincing? Here are two reasons to invest the time:

You can identify less obvious ICP traits:

An ideal customer profile can be as simple or complex as need be and sometimes adding a few non-obvious traits can explain why two seemingly identical customers buy very differently.

For example, if you sell to hospitals, it’s probably obvious that your ideal customer is a hospital. But, by analyzing your most successful customers, you could uncover that the most successful customers are not only hospitals, they are hospitals with an attached emergency room.

To uncover the details noted above, review your largest deals and repeat/renewed customers. Break down which activities led to created deals and review support tickets or consulting done with those customers. Conduct at least seven interviews with Sales and Service teammates and try to identify any themes that come up.

Conducting this analysis keeps the conversation data driven:

Humans are notoriously irrational (e.g. motivated reasoning and recency bias) and grounding the conversation in hard facts will help teams come to a better final result.

Once you have a list of qualifications, it’s common to add tiers or levels to the ICP. With tiers, you can differentiate perfect fits from the “good-not-great” fits. Matching companies with the appropriate ICP and ICP level can get tedious FAST. If your marketing system or CRM supports automation, it’s worth investing in a workflow that automatically marks companies matching the ICP (and the corresponding tier/level if you choose) so they can be viewed and reported on in real time. Tools like HubSpot's ABM software can help you define your ICPs with workflow templates. You will also be able to leverage AI-powered recommendations.

After your ICP is determined, your team should review the companies matching the ICP weekly or monthly and see if any companies are worth marking as target accounts. Done correctly, an ICP can provide an evergreen source of target accounts that leverages the inbound funnel you have already built.

4. Consider picking accounts based on deal acceleration opportunities.

One of the fastest ways to realize the value of an ABM strategy is to use it to help deals close more quickly.

No doubt, the sales team is already expertly educating the buying committee over email, in meetings, and on the phone. But, sales is limited by how much time each member of the buying committee wants to engage with that rep. What if the decision maker misses a demo meeting or the end-user wants to research on their own time?

By deploying marketing (e.g. website smart content, targeted ads, social media, personalized email) that matches the same value propositions that Sales is using. With this strategy, buyers can make decisions even faster because they are able to be educated by sales teams as well as branded content.

Mark the companies associated with the largest active deals as target accounts. Then, create simple account plans for each deal and deploy content accordingly.

No matter what reason you have for picking target accounts - be intentional! Choose them for a reason and make sure Marketing and Sales are in agreement on what that reason is. When you choose the right target accounts for the right reason, every other step of ABM fall into place more easily.

5. Build a data-driven account-targeting strategy.

Track and measure key milestones with HubSpot's ABM software.

Using the right data fuels your ABM rocket. Neglecting to use data, or even worse, using the wrong data, can lead to internal combustion and complete system failure.

The two key types of data you’ll need to draw better company-level insights are firmographics and technographics.

Firmographics are company characteristics that best predict a good fit including company size, industry, number of employees, estimated revenue, estimated growth, and number of locations.

Technographics are the technologies your target accounts currently use or are looking to invest in -- for example, complementary technologies to yours, technology that rules out your solution or makes it less necessary, or competitive solutions where you know you have a highly win rate.

6. Get insights on contacts to shorten sales cycles

Next, identify the contacts you’ll need to reach out to within your target accounts. Take the time upfront to research the customer stakeholders, their place on the organizational chart, personal goals, and the level of influence they each have. Targeted sales prospecting lets you get to the right people in less time.

The specific details you’re looking for include:

• Job title
• Tenure
• Decision-making hierarchy
• Account affiliation
• Activity/engagement history
• Skills and proficiencies
• Experience with your category

Once you’ve collected these details, you can build an “influence matrix,” which will give you and your team members more clarity into the buying and decision making processes within the account. This step can decrease your sales cycle by as much as 50%.

7. Get access to decision makers with market insights

After you’ve found the right accounts and the right contacts, deliver relevant business insights.

To organize your account based plays effectively, you need to know:

1. The target’s industry and market trends
2. SWOT analysis of the target account
3. The relationships inside the account
4. Your connections to the account

This information will lead you to the content and delivery methods you should use with each account. Providing compelling insights generates credibility, trust, and ultimately more business.

Identify the Right ABM Data with Insight Resources

If you want to be successful with ABM, you need to invest in new resources. The proportionately larger deals you’ll be closing will make this investment worth it.

Here are some of our best tips and lessons we’ve learned around implementing ABM:

• Insight generation has to be somebody’s job, or it’s nobody’s job.
• Incentivize your people: Compensate your Sales Development Reps on insight collection metrics, or run a SPIF.
• Utilize third-party vendors that specialize in collecting insights on companies and people.

This is just the beginning of the ABM process, but it’s the most important piece. Get this wrong, and you’ll be setting yourself up for failure. Get this right and your business will see growth like it’s never seen before.

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally published in April 2017, but was updated for comprehensiveness and freshness in 2020.

 

Companies often believe the more prospects, the better — but pursuing the wrong types of prospects wastes precious time, cash, and resources. That's why having a well-constructed outreach plan is absolutely critical to your sales department's immediate effectiveness and long-term success.

In this post, we’ll define outreach strategy, review some sales outreach statistics, see some actionable sales outreach tactics, and go over some essential sales outreach tools.

There's no one-size-fits-all model for an effective outreach plan. How you structure yours will rest on your business needs, the nature of your product or service, and the personas you're targeting. That being said, some common objectives guide how many — if not most — outreach strategies are constructed.

Those include goals like closing deals, initiating new relationships with prospects, building trust with your audience, educating leads on your offerings, or simply making contact with potential customers for the first time.

For many, the term "outreach" is most closely associated with traditional models like cold calling and door-to-door visits — but modern sales teams aren't restricted to those more dated methods.

With access to a diverse array of channels — including email, phone, social media, and marketing campaigns — today's sales teams can readily conduct more versatile, wide-reaching outreach.

By and large, teams most involved in conducting sales outreach are salespeople and their managers, but nowadays, assisting outreach isn't always specific to the sales org — marketing teams occasionally provide additional insight to flesh out better-informed, more effective outreach efforts.

Before we get into the hard, actionable strategies you can use to shape your sales outreach plan, let's take a look at some key sales outreach statistics.

Sales Outreach Statistics

1. 41.2% of salespeople said their phone is the most effective sales tool at their disposal.
2. 19% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during the awareness stage of their buying process — when they're first learning about the product.
3. 60% want to connect with sales during the consideration stage — after they've researched the options and come up with a shortlist.
4. 20% want to talk during the decision stage — once they're decided which product to buy.
5. Only 24% of sales emails are opened.
6. 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls
7. 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up call.
8. Eight out of 10 prospects want to talk to sales reps via email over any other medium.

1. Create an ideal customer profile.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) should consist of five strict bullet points — those will guide who you reach out to and how you reach out to them. If any prospects don't check all five boxes, aim to discount them.

An ICP might consist of the following:

• Revenue size (e.g., more than $200 million in annual sales).
• Employee count (e.g., no fewer than 1,000 verified LinkedIn employees).
• Organization’s employee structure (e.g., the brand must have an in-house media team).
• Type of product sold (e.g., a direct manufacturer).
• A mutual goal (e.g., a manufacturer that cares about increasing brand awareness).

Once you’ve created your ICP, start thinking of who might work for a company that fits your ideal bill, and be sure to think beyond the surface. Don't ask superficial, trivial questions like, "Are they in marketing?" Instead, address in-depth, meaningful issues and concerns regarding their professional motivations.

That leads me to the next step.

2. Create a persona map.

Choose the three primary roles that you sell to — like the VP of advertising, VP of Media, and VP of Brand Marketing — and identify the following for each role:

• The buyer’s two to three primary daily responsibilities, like projects they work on and think about each day.
• Two to three ways your company can help make their day-to-day tasks more manageable.
• Two to three of the buyer’s long-term goals.
• Two to three ways your company can help further the buyer’s longer-term goals.

This approach will save you valuable time and effort. By filling in the five points listed above, you can easily craft effective outreach messaging — saving you valuable time and effort that would otherwise go into putting your messaging together without structure.

When conducting email outreach, you can repurpose points two and three for targeted messaging. Here is an example:

So let's say you’ve mapped out the specifics of your ideal customer and the stakeholders’ motivations — now, where do you go from there? You can start by prioritizing the right prospects.

3. Prioritize your personas.

Prioritize the personas you create by ranking each buyer on a scale from one to five on the following metrics:

• Alignment with your solution.
• Size of their budget.
• Level of influence within their organization.

Once you’ve calculated the scores, lay out a strategic plan for your outreach that begins with buyers with the highest totals. This process is sometimes called Account-Based Selling — a strategy that focuses on bringing in the right clients instead of the most clients. The email below is an example of an outreach email to a VP of media, a high-ranking lead.

This exercise will drastically reduce wasted time and optimize your outreach — all while allowing you to get in front of the right people faster.

4. Determine the best outreach channel.

Not all outreach channels are created equal, so do what you can to identify the ones your prospects are most active on. Once you've done that, meet them there, and connect with them on their turf — for instance, if you notice a prospect is particularly active on LinkedIn, see if you can initiate contact over the platform.

Or maybe your prospect is on your company's email list and opens every email they receive. That would tell you their inbox is active and they consistently engage with emails from your business. In that case, email outreach could be a solid bet.

The outreach channel you use at any given time will vary based on the prospect's preferences, the information you have available, and the nature of the sale. One way or another, meet your customers where they are — and treat that process like a priority, not something you throw on the back burner.

5. Personalize your messaging.

Sales, as a practice, is the process of cultivating trust in a tight window. You'll rarely land deals with prospects who aren't sold on you — and coming off as callous, uninterested, and impersonal is one of the easiest ways to undermine a potential business arrangement.

That's why a thoughtful, tailored message can be a crucial asset in moving a sale along. Prospects want to feel seen, heard, and understood — if you can convey all that through your messaging, you can build the kind of trust you need to develop a lasting, productive relationship.

When conducting outreach, customize your message with the prospect’s name, company name (if selling B2B), and any other relevant context you have about the recipient and the problem they're trying to solve.

While using templates or scripts can be a good way to keep your messages structured and improve efficiency, you need to avoid coming across as overly-scripted or generic. Thoughtful, personalized messages will feel less sales-y and are more likely to receive a response.

6. Send a follow-up.

Say you've successfully contacted a prospect and had a productive consultation. Now, you need to address when they can expect to hear from you and touch base with them quickly enough to keep your conversation top of mind.

Sending a follow-up message shortly after your engagement is the best way to get there. Here’s an example:

This message recaps the conversation you had with the prospect and establishes your willingness to answer any questions they might have. It also serves as a reminder about the agreed-upon time and date for your follow-up conversation.

7. Record all information in your CRM.

Documenting your outreach efforts in your preferred customer relationship management (CRM) system is crucial to your outreach plan's success.

Storing all of your prospects’ data in a central location lets you readily pick up where you left off without searching for information — making the rest of your sales process that much easier.

For instance, if a team member has to take over an account for you, logging your data in your CRM gives them everything they need to finish a sale whenever, wherever.

The seven points listed so far are generally enough to establish a solid basis for a sound outreach plan. That said, there are some "bonus" steps to consider that can make your strategy more straightforward and effective.

8. Align with marketing teams.

Sales outreach has a lot in common with certain brands of marketing — after all, outreach is essentially the process of salespeople "advertising" themselves and their businesses to leads.

That common ground — along with outreach's potential for helping generate and retain business — can make sound sales and marketing alignment a cornerstone of an effective outreach plan.

Marketers can review the copy you create for email, social media, and call scripts to ensure that it is on-brand and in keeping with your business tone and style — or they can even supply you with branding copy that you can incorporate yourself.

Analytics are also central to successful marketing efforts, so you can ask them to give you the data you need to decide on the channels you’ll use to conduct your outreach.

For example, maybe you’ve initially planned on making phone calls, but analytics data shows that emails with CTAs are the most effective for driving conversions. Your marketing team can help you craft the right approach to get the most out of your emails.

9. Automate whenever possible.

Automation is becoming a staple of sales org's operations and for good reason — the right automation tools can enhance productivity and save valuable time, taking the inefficient legwork out of the more repetitive, rote tasks associated with sales outreach.

There are various routes you can choose to take based on your individual business needs, but you should at least look into standard tools that help with processes like email automation or setting meeting reminders — along with pipeline analytics tools that help you understand how leads engage with what you send them.

Sales Outreach Tools

1. CRMs

Your average customer relationship management (CRM) system offers functionality that can help streamline, simplify, and ultimately enhance your sales outreach efforts.

A CRM provides a shared repository for storing your customer data. It lets various stakeholders within your sales org track any interactions your business has with customers, maintain notes on potential opportunities, and establish and standardize processes and workflows reps can follow to connect with prospects more effectively.

Taken together, those features — among several others — allow your sales team to conduct better-informed, more effective outreach efforts. A CRM can offer a more robust, thoughtful picture of who tends to buy your product or service. With that intel, you can create detailed buyer personas and tailor your messaging to best suit the prospects you connect with.

An estimated 65% of sales organizations used a CRM in 2020 — and that number is bound to trend upward as these systems become more commonplace. If you're not incorporating a CRM into your sales outreach plan at this point, you're selling your sales org short.

2. Email Automation Resources

As I touched on earlier in this article, roughly eight out of 10 prospects want to talk to sales reps via email — so any resources that can expedite and assist your email outreach can be invaluable assets for your sales org.

Email automation tools allow your reps to structure thoughtful, effective messages to be distributed via timely, well-targeted workflows and campaigns. These kinds of resources allow you to push along a high volume of messages that don't sacrifice too much personalization in the interest of efficiency.

Several email automation tools allow you to match the content and cadence of your messaging to suit individual leads' behavior and preferences — considering factors like the emails your prospects open, web pages they visit, and purchases they make when determining what messages they receive at certain stages of their buyer's journeys.

It can be difficult to reconcile thoughtfulness and solid time management when conducting sales outreach — especially when trying to reach prospects via email. Being able to consistently strike a balance between the two is where email automation's value lies.

3. Sales Automation Resources

Sales automation resources — beyond the email ones just mentioned — can add another layer of efficacy to your sales outreach efforts. Tools that allow for automated workflows that notify reps when prospects take noteworthy actions can help your team zero in on who will be most receptive to your contact at certain points in their relationships with your business.

Other sales automation tools like meeting scheduling links, automatic call logging, and predictive lead scoring can help you reach the right prospects at the right time with the right messaging and resources for seamlessly advancing deals.

Your Strategy Will Help You Meet Business Objectives

What’s the result of this upfront investment in strategy? Efficient outreach that specifically addresses the needs of your various buyers. Your messages will resonate more, and your prospects will respond more frequently.

Say goodbye to the typical results at early-stage companies, and say hello to more calls, meetings, and closed deals.

Without a steady stream of actionable leads, the sales funnel will eventually dry out. So what can a company do to ensure it is not only driving new leads for their channel partners, but also helping convert them into sales? Read on to discover three steps you can take to accomplish just that.

To be free, or not to be free. That is the question. 

I have a love/dislike (hate felt too strong) relationship with “free”. I love that anyone can give a free product a test drive, but dislike the lack of commitment that accompanies free. On the one hand, you want as many people trying your product as possible, on the other hand you work your butt off building something that people can take a bite of, discard and forget like a sample at Costco because it was, well, free.

We’ll start to unravel how to think about “free” in this post with the following topic areas:

• Defining “Free”
• Why use free?
• Picking the right form of free
• The “cost” of free
• Perception, Expectations & Virality.

Defining “Free”

“Free” includes a few variants that we’ll all bundle under the “Free” umbrella:

Indirectly Monetized Free

The product is free and monetized through things like advertising or data. For example:

• Facebook is free for consumers, but monetized through advertising.
• Firefox and Google Chrome offer free software. They monetize by using search revenue shares and leveraging the data they capture from browsing to enable other business initiatives.
• Credit card companies aggregate data which becomes a sellable product to businesses.

Freemium

There is a free version of the product with limitations (“paywalls”) and there are one or more paid versions of the product. Typically, the free version of the product is limited (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Evernote, Dropbox) and the paid version(s) include more features. A customer can typically derive value from the product (e.g., edit a picture and download it, create and send a survey and analyze data) but the more valuable features sit behind a paywall which requires a user to upgrade to access.

Free trial

A product has a free trial period where it collects some information from a customer (e.g., name, username, email, demographics, credit card information) in exchange for a limited time access to a product that is typically only available to paying customers. For example:

• Salesforce uses it’s free trial to allow users to understand the interface and functionality but also as a key lead generation tool
• PicMonkey uses a free trial to give potential customers access to its full range of features and storage so they can evaluate whether a paid subscription is a fit
• Gotomeeting and nearly all conferencing solutions use free trials to let users try out the product before they purchase
• In exchange for some information (e.g., email address) a customer is granted access to a version of a product. The complexity here is that that “version” could be a limited version, full version, a certain SKU/package. A trial by nature has a time limit, most are 7 days or 30 days, but should be mapped to the duration a customer can actually “try” the product.

Why use Free?

Free (inclusive of all the derivations described above) is most often a way to reduce friction and get customers to give your product or service a try. Free is a marketing tactic. And Free is an incredible way to open up the top of your funnel (increase the number of users who give your product a try). So Free is most effective when a) the customer expectation is that there is some Free way to evaluate a product b) when getting new users at a very low cost is critical (e.g., startups often leverage free to minimize sales/marketing costs) and c) you are trying to steal share from dominant providers or convincing customers to change behavior or do something very new.

Picking the right form of Free

If you’ve decided that Free makes sense for your business, there are two categories of decisions:

• Level 1 (Business Model): These are picking the right form of Free (Indirectly Monetized, Freemium, Free Trial)
• Level 2 (Optimization): These include things like the duration of a free trial, which features sit behind a paywall (freemium speak for which features are paid only) or whether to collect a credit card to allow customers to enter your free trial.

Level 1 decisions are a pain in the *ss to change because they impact so many things (UX, messaging, marketing, existing customers, billing systems…). But Level 1 decisions can and should change over time when it makes sense.

Level 2 decisions should be simpler to change, and can really help optimize a business. As with any decision that will impact lots of customers and teams, it’s best to be really thoughtful and try to get it as right as you can first and then optimize.

Level 1 Decisions

Start with the customer and work backward. How does your target customer expect to use your offering? Are there incumbents who have set standards that you can leverage in terms of purchasing model, or innovate on if the purchasing model is a customer problem?

Case Study – Dropbox: For a business like Dropbox, does Free Trial or Freemium make sense? The consumer value proposition is a long term one (e.g., your “magic moment” with Dropbox may come when you don’t expect it and can access a file from your phone when you really need it). And that may be hard to recognize in a 7 or even 30 day period, so Freemium feels like an appropriate model where you gate the storage amount and maybe some of the advanced features. The business model is also very sticky, so once you can get someone to upload enough files to go beyond a paywall, you may have a customer for life.

But, a Free Trial may make a lot more sense for teams who want to understand functionality before committing to a new storage solution, and a 30 day or even longer trial may be required to give a group time to try out the product.

Case Study – Spotify: In a highly competitive field where Apple, Google, Amazon, Pandora and others play, Spotify has to be excellent at what it does and be aggressive on the top of the funnel to keep users and continue to find/steal new ones. Spotify was an early mover in how it let users consume music which helped it gain user scale and funding to keep iterating. But users expect a lot for Free. So offering Indirectly Monetized Free & Freemium makes sense to get users engaged, and because other companies (e.g., Pandora and even terrestrial radio) helped set/manage user expectations. Using freemium paywalls like devices interoperability and local storage are smart paywalls and leveraging a trial is great way to get users a full taste of the value of the paid product. Importantly, the free trial period (whether 7 or 30 days) doesn’t let a user take all the value. Music listening, like file storage, or conference calling, is for the majority of people an ongoing need.

As you can see in the above examples, some businesses decide to employ multiple Free models. It’s about mapping the experience to target customer expectations, and considering when you want to reduce or introduce friction to open your funnel or drive better qualification.

Level 2 Decisions

When you land on a set of Level 1 business model decisions that will map to a Customer Journey that you feel will get and convert enough users through your funnel (unless you are purely looking to Indirectly Monetize Free), it’s time to optimize. What decisions are optimization focused?

If you’re using Freemium

Which features sit behind a paywall? You should iterate on these. They are hard to test. So running “A” tests, as a comparison to “A/B” tests is an interesting strategy. It basically means just move some features for a period of time and see what happens. There will be some backlash from existing users, but if you come up with a methodology on your approach, and something you can justify and be transparent about you should feel confident. When more customers pay you, it not only increases your chance of staying in business, but increases the amount of resources you can put into making your product even better for customers. Moving features or versions from free to paid can seem tricky, but don’t be afraid to use your support, marketing and social teams to handle backlash with customer friendly policies.

Creating smart “trojan horse” features. The smartest freemium apps help get you deep into the experience and derive value before they hook you. I remember at SurveyMonkey when we tweaked a feature and let free users collect more than 100 responses, but we had a 100 response limit on viewing. So what did that 101st respondent say? Want to know? Upgrade… Is this “evil” – I don’t think so at all. In the SurveyMonkey case, someone has already gotten tremendous value out of the product and is a great candidate to derive even more value.

If you’re using Free Trial

7 day, 30 day, 1 day? I’ve never seen 1 day, but the length of a trial is key. How long does it take a customer to really “trial” your product? If you are operating a project management (e.g., Basecamp, Asana) or CRM product (e.g., Salesforce), getting multiple folks onboard and finding time to play with the tool takes a bit of time, so 30 days feels right. But what if you are Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, PicMonkey? A shorter trial can make more sense since getting to a successful outcome (e.g., watch a movie, listen to a song offline, create a great design) shouldn’t take 30 days. The trial is your gift to the user – helping them gain confidence that the product is worth the price. The trial duration and all of your assorted engagement and onboarding marketing efforts are to make sure the customer takes advantage of their trial in a timely fashion.

Credit card upfront, or later? Put more simply, do you block your trial with a credit card requirement? If you have hard costs in offering your service (e.g., Netflix, Dollar Shave Club), capturing a credit card up front (or charging for shipping costs) may be important at certain stages of your business to reduce risk. There is a fine balance of optimizing for sheer volume of users and quality (paying) customers. The shift toward mobile consumption and federated logins (e.g., Google and Facebook) can be helpful in reducing the likelihood of fake/ghost accounts. At the end of the day, it’s always about continuously learning about your target customer and how to explain/demonstrate your value and then asking for payment at the right time/place in their journey. And what makes most sense for the customer can be vastly different based on the existing expectations, industry, product, value proposition, business model, etc.

The “Cost” of Free

Free comes with real costs which typically come in a few different forms.

Hard costs (e.g., bandwidth, compute, storage, customer support): the operating costs you incur to support those users who may never pay you directly. These costs can really add up if you are not disciplined about your model. If there isn’t strategic reason to provide a public service, or if you aren’t Indirectly Monetizing, at some point the freeloading customers can be a huge cost drag on your business.

Time/distraction costs. Free opens up your funnel which makes it harder to qualify leads. When you have a paid-only product offering, the inbound leads are a lot more qualified on average. Which would you rather have?

• 100 sales qualified leads
• 1,000 marketing qualified leads
• 10,000 registered free users

It all depends on your conversion rates, your price point, your funnel, your sales process and business model…

Another consideration is that if you plan to go upmarket over time, your organization will have to be comfortable “outgrowing” your free or lower value users over time which isn’t always easy to navigate.

Perception, Expectations & Virality.

The “free monster” can set customer pricing expectations at zero which can be hard to overcome. The “free monster” is something I heard from our investors at PicMonkey and was meant to encompass the competition our paid product faces from both our own free product and every other offering out there that is using Free to acquire users. Whenever you have a free offering or you start out with a low price point, that can anchor customers. It can be very hard to upsell something that costs $5k/year when a customer is used to paying $5/month, and even harder when your brand is associated with being a “free” offering. It’s not great when users wonder how you even make money…

Many businesses can justify a low price tier or Free because their customers are doing the marketing for them by sharing their product. This is especially true for products like Facebook and Freemium tools like SurveyMonkey. One area to keep an eye on is that when customers become part of your marketing engine, the quality of their work reflects on your brand. So if your Free customers are using a limited version of your product, potentially producing lower quality output, they may be spreading the wrong message by not showcasing how great your product really is.

Hopefully this primer on the variations of Free was helpful. Please don’t hesitate to comment or reach out and keep the dialogue going, there is much much more to talk about when it comes to leveraging the power of Free.

The post A Look at the Impact of Freemium Pricing on SaaS Products appeared first on OpenView Labs.

While planning for a trade show, exhibitors should take the time to set up a proper framework to gauge and maximize the results of their trade show program and overall trade show ROI.

According to a recent study conducted by Demand Metric (Event Engagement: Accelerating the Customer Lifecycle), 20% of event marketers do not possess a clear understanding on how to properly track or measure their trade show ROI.

In this post, we cover the three most important areas of trade show ROI: aligning organizational goals with trade show objectives, maximizing trade show ROI and tacking and measuring key event marketing metrics.

Aligning Organizational Goals and Trade Show Objectives

Your trade show objectives have a big influence your trade show strategy and have the greatest impact on your trade show ROI. Trade shows—while important—are just one channel in the overall marketing mix.

To make sure your trade show return on investment contributes to the success of your overall marketing program, align your trade show goals and objectives with your organization’s wider sales and marketing goals such as generating sales, building brand awareness and nurturing key partner relationships.

Keys to goal alignment:

• Speak with stakeholders in other departments to see how they measure success.
• Ask your sales managers which demographics yield the highest conversion rates as leads and tailor your marketing to target them on the show floor.
• Review your organizations growth projections and plan to contribute to the overall growth with your trade show program.

Having clear, aligned objectives will set the course for every decision that is made during the trade show planning process, making it easier to evaluate the success of every decision after the show concludes.

Communication and Number-Based Goals

For the purposes of better tracking your trade show ROI, separate your trade show goals and objectives into two categories: communications goals and quantifiable goals.

Common Communication-Related Objectives:

• Establishing or enhance attendees awareness of your company’s reputation and capabilities
• Promoting a specific brand message, re-branding campaign or slogan
• Differentiating your company and its capabilities from competitors
• Announcing a new product, service or capability

Common Quantifiable or Numbers-Based Objectives:

• Tally the number of prospects consulted
• Count the number of establish qualified leads gathered by staff
• Test perceptions of attendees with market research, such as industry trends and surveys
• Calculating revenue generated through on the floor sales

How To Maximize Your Trade Show ROI

Trade shows provide your company with the ultimate opportunity to meet face-to-face with your competitors, clients and prospects all in one place.

To make sure you get the most out of your trade show program, you will need the right strategic approach. Below we outline tips on how to best leverage your presence at an industry event to increase your trade show ROI.

Pick the Right Event

There are likely a large number of trade shows and events for your industry or niche. It is unrealistic to attend every possible event, so choosing the ones with the most potential benefit towards helping you achieve your goals will allow you to maximize your potential ROI.

Before selecting a show, you should carefully compare and contrast each event to see which ones are likely to help you achieve a healthy return on exhibiting.

Things to consider when selecting a show with trade show ROI in mind:

• The estimated cost of exhibiting at the trade show
• How many qualified potential customers attended the trade show in the past
• How likely will your brand, product or service stand out on the show floor
• The significance of the trade show within your industry
• The location of the trade show (closer shows will have smaller traveling, lodging and shipping costs)

Have a Strong Pre-Trade Show Push

The hours, days and months leading up to your event should be used for pre-event promotion of your trade show campaign.

An effective pre-trade show marketing strategy will create a healthy buzz around your company, which in turn will increase the number of booth visitors, lead volume and overall trade show ROI.

Tips for Pre-Show Marketing:

• Bigger shows will provide a list of media contacts attending the show. While your main focus may be winning new customers, engaging the press can add value to your exhibiting experience.
• Use your company’s social media profiles to facilitate conversations with prospects and clients. For example, if you attend an educational session or workshop, share some of the valuable talking points with your followers.
• Entice attendees to visit your booth by promoting giveaways, products demonstrations and in-booth games.

Host Events

Hosting a dinner or cocktail hour is a classic method for creating an opportunity to meet clients and prospects in a more intimate setting. These kinds of events can help cement the positive relationships you have already built with clients, as well as bolstering your brand in the minds of prospective clients.

Inviting existing clients and new prospects is a winning strategy because dinners and cocktail hours are more relaxed than the show floor and are better for socializing and meeting new people.

Trade Show Booth Design

A large number of trade show attendees pre-plan which booths they are going to visit before they enter the convention hall. If you implemented a strong pre-show marketing push, you should attract a respectable crowd in your booth.

However, there are still plenty of attendees who may be unaware of your company or may have missed some of your pre-show promotions. To make sure you maximize your trade show ROI, you will need to attract these attendees.

Creative booth designs featuring attention-grabbing design options like hanging signs, education kiosks, conference rooms and demonstration areas, will naturally cause attendees to gravitate towards your booth helping you maximize your trade show ROI.

Booth Design Tips:

• Themed trade show exhibits are perfect for grabbing the attention of passersby and allow you to show off the personality behind your brand.
• Your marketing message should be short, clear and easy to grasp, so eliminate buzzwords and stress benefits of your product or service.
• Maximize your booth space to make your exhibit as traffic-friendly as possible. Cluttered booths are often passed by prospects looking to make the most of their time on the show floor.
• Think of your signage as the first impression you make on the audience. Your goal is to have signage that attracts the type of people you want to meet.

Check out our custom portfolio for exhibit design inspiration!

Create a Winning Team

To create a winning trade show team, it is essential to look for team players who are not only great at selling, but who also work well in a group setting.

Tips for creating a winning team:

• Make sure your team members align their values and goals with each other and with your company.
• Maintain a high-energy environment that promotes team-oriented solutions and offers initiatives for thinking outside the box.
• Identify the diverse personality types of your team members and learn how to blend them together to make a stronger unit.
• Ask veteran staff to mentor younger or less experienced team members.

Execute a Follow-Up Strategy

After your event has wrapped up make sure you have a detailed follow-up strategy to guide future correspondence to your prospects.

Without a good follow-up, you risk hard-earned leads, negatively impacting your trade show ROI .

Tips for post-show follow ups:

• Promptly reaching out to trade show leads is important. A timely, professional and specially-tailored response is an ideal way to make your brand stands out.
• Trade show leads may sometimes be ignored by the sale team back at the office. Train your in-house team to follow the follow-up strategy.
• Diversify your follow-up correspondence from show to show to avoid being repetitive and getting your messages ignored by prospects.
• Provide your prospects with specific, tangible options for engaging with your company after the show. Free white papers, case studies and personalized demotions and consultation, work well.

Measuring Trade Show ROI

After your trade show has ended, you need to efficiently communicate the value of your trade show marketing efforts.

To measure the value of your trade show, we outlined three methods of compiling the necessary data to track and measure the effectiveness of your trade show marketing campaign.

Estimate Trade Show Revenue

Tracking the revenue from a given trade show can be difficult because sales opportunities are not usually closed on the show floor. Instead, leads are routed to the sales team and—depending on the length of the sales cycle—it may take months or for a lead to turn into an actual sale.

However, you do not have to wait that long to measure the revenue generated from a trade show. You can create a rough approximation of a trade show’s revenue value using your company’s commonly accepted, internal assumptions and averages:

Step 1: Leads

Tally the number of leads gathered on the trade show floor.

Step 2: Close Rate Percentage

Ask your sales team to estimate the average percentage of trade show leads that result in a sale.

Step 3: Average Sale Value

Determine the average value of a sale originating from a trade show lead.

Step 4: Estimated Show Value

Once you have obtained the data, use the following formula: leads x close rate % x average sale value = estimated show revenue

Example Formula:

50 leads x 5% close rate x $10,000 average sale value = $250,000 estimated show revenue

Using this formula is effective because it is based on actual data provided by your sales department. Executives and sales managers will be more likely to accept your estimate as an accurate measure of your trade show program’s revenue impact and overall trade show ROI.

Identifying Cost Savings

Sales revenue is not the only metric that can prove the value of your trade show campaign. Exhibiting can also be an effective means of saving your company money by reducing the amount of off-site sales calls with prospects.
To calculate the savings associated with your trade show participation, gather the following information
Step 1: Sales Meetings

Tally the number of sales meetings conducted on the show floor.

Step 2: Cost Per Meeting

Determine the cost of an average off-site sales meeting.

Step 2: Cost Savings

Once you have obtained the data, plug it into the following formula: sales meetings x cost per meeting = cost savings

Example Formula:

10 sales meetings x $1,000 cost per meeting = $10,000 cost savings.

The total cost-savings number is not a measure of how exhibiting reduced overall costs, but an estimated cost typically incurred through off-site meetings and sales calls to achieve similar results.

Calculate Promotional Value

The more exposure and impressions a company receives, the more likely they will achieve sales and revenue goals.

Consult your public relations or advertising departments to see if they have an assigned cost value per impression. Then estimate the number of prospects and visitors your trade show campaign reached and multiple it by the cost value of an impression.

Example Formula:

15,000 impressions x $20 average cost per impression = $300,000

If your advertising or public relations departments do not have an average cost per impression established, consider the cost to acquire the same exposure through advertising, direct marketing or other means.

Get Nimlok’s Free Trade Show ROI Playbook

If you are looking for more advice on how to rev up your trade show ROI, download our free Trade show ROI guide which is filled with tips and tricks to get the most out of your next trade show campaign!

A nurture program is a necessary component of any business’s digital advertising strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re peddling alpaca flannels on a one-page Shopify site or you’re hunting boomers in need of retirement savings management, nurture can help grow your brand and your bottom line.

Sometimes (most of the time) people just aren’t ready to convert, to purchase your product or become a bona fide lead, after your first interactions. Depending on your industry, it could take minutes or months to close a prospect. In that time, there’s very little you can do to stop a prospect from being swayed by your competition. That very little is called nurture.

Nurture is the catch-all given to whatever systems a business has in place to move a prospect down their conversion funnel, turning a window shopper into a cash-paying consumer.

Unfortunately, most businesses seem to think nurturing begins and ends with email. And while email is an invaluable channel for interacting with your prospects, it has its limitations.

That’s why today, I’m going to show you how to use paid search and paid social to make your nurture marketing funnel more WAY more effective.

To scrounge up enough strategies to make this post worth your while, I recently met with our in-house paid acquisition maverick, Brett McHale, who says that using AdWords and Facebook to nurture your prospects helps advertisers do three incalculably important things. It…

• Creates brand familiarity
• Provides value
• Handles objections

According to Brett: “Nurture marketing is all about value. Value of your brand, your offering. Facebook and AdWords help you reach targeted subsets of your audience in a handful of ways. If you can show a prospect that you’re the solution to their problem without stalking them all over the internet, you’re T-ing up one kick-ass customer.”

I’ll get to the full list of ways you can nurture your prospects with PPC in a minute, but first…

The Problem with Email Nurture…

Everybody’s doin’ it.

The two primary reasons you need to leverage PPC as a foundational component of your nurture program are mediocre or bad open rates and email overload.

Here’s a picture of the promotions tab in my Gmail inbox from one morning last week:

I’ve never read a single one of these emails. Unless your subject line game is off the charts, the promotions tab is where nurture goes to die. An elephant graveyard for bad and just-okay email copy.

With PPC, you effectively skip over the middleman. By circumventing your prospects’ inboxes, you’re only competing with advertisers on a SERP, a relevant website on the GDN, or Facebook / Instagram. You’re also getting a leg up on your competitors, who are probably only using an automated email funnel to nurture prospects (if they’re doing it at all).

The second problem impacting your email nurture program? Low open rates. Check out this list of average email marketing stats by industry from MailChimp. They’re not so low as to warrant no longer investing in email marketing, but they’re not especially encouraging either. Worse still are the click-through rates. Yikes.

Now, email nurture is still valuable. If a prospect opens an email and you provide value in the form of a free resource, odds are they’re likely to open your next one, too. We do this to great effect at WordStream.

I say that to say this: Email nurture is great, but on its own it simply isn’t enough. Paid search and social will be your salvation.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the 11 ways to turn prospects into customers with paid search and paid social.

#1: Keyword Research + Audience Definition = Formula for Success

Make it easier to nurture your prospects by finding the right ones in the first place.

The biggest advantage paid search and social give you over other forms of advertising is the ability to target hyper-specific subsets of the population. This is a real boon for small businesses; a plumber in Peabody only pays for the clicks to his website instead of forking over a fat premium to flash a TV spot at glazed, unmeasurable eyeballs.

We can use this same powerful advantage in prospect nurturing, too.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

You can use keyword research and audience definition to ensure that, at the very top of your funnel, the right people are seeing your ads.

If you sell sneakers, targeting the extremely broad keyword “shoes” would be a waste of your money; if you’re a small shop, it’s arguable that even bidding on “sneakers” would be foolish. Instead, you want to consider searcher intent: what do the keywords you’re bidding on and the search queries that trigger them say about the end-goal of a prospect?

By avoiding broad or only tangentially related keywords, you ensure that your nurture funnel has less work to do. Instead of being responsible for bringing a searcher from “gee, what’s a shoe” to handing over their payment information, you can instead focus on the folks who are more informed. Niching down like this means your nurture material—ad copy, emails, etc.—can focus on building brand value in the minds of qualified prospects, moving them closer to becoming a customer.

Things work similarly on Facebook. You can leverage the AMPLE targeting options available to advertisers to get an idea of how many prospects in the area you’d like to advertise fit your business’s target demographic. This gives you an idea as to both the total volume of potential consumers and the various subsets within that group.

Returning to our sneaker salesman example, I’m probably not going to advertise Jordans and Vibram 5 Fingers to the same person, right? Doing so would poison the well at the beginning of my relationship with that prospect: I clearly have no idea what they’re interested in, they’ll buy elsewhere.

But what if instead, I split my efforts in two, and layer Facebook’s Interest targeting on top of the existing demographic information to segment my audience into “Jordan” people and “Vibram” people? Now, my interactions with prospects start on a positive note: I’m showing them something they’ve actively conveyed interest in.

My nurture funnel now does less work because prospects enter the sales process much closer to making a purchase.

#2: Find the Right Ad Format for Your Offering

Your nurture program exists in stages, right? A prospect enters, you woo them with free stuff or knowledge or discounts, and as a direct result of these efforts, they buy.

Easy, right?

Well, no. Because prospects enter your nurture funnel at varying stages of readiness.

Some enter with no idea what your business does. How serendipitous! What opportunity! Let’s call this person Prospect A.

Other prospects, more informed consumers, will come to the table with some understanding of how your offering works. They’ve identified their problem and are in search of a solution. This is Prospect B.

The way you interact with these two types of people matters a great deal. Show Person A an offer they just aren’t ready for and they’ll feel alienated; serve Prospect B something and they’ll deem your product or service beneath them. By choosing the right kind of offering, you establish your brand as trustworthy. Your emails and banner ads can go from mild annoyance to helpful resource.

How the offering is presented, though, is just as important as the offering itself.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

Choosing the right ad format for your nurture offerings is key. We’ve already established that email can be a bit of a crapshoot because of inbox bloat. The rest of the internet is just as riddled with ads. As such, your nurture creative needs to reach its intended audience in the perfect format, whether that’s a text ad, a video, or something else entirely.

One of our top of funnel nurture offerings at WordStream is a whitepaper called “How to Compete in AdWords Without Just Raising Bids.” It’s a guide that teaches AdWords neophytes about best practices, a helpful tool for someone learning the ropes. The design for the Facebook ad used to reflects the simplicity of the offer itself.

But look at the other ad. It’s a video for the AdWords Performance Grader, a tool advertisers can use to gain an understanding of how their account stacks up to competitors and identifies areas that need to be optimized to enhance performance. The format of the ad, a short video, is dynamic and informative, concretizing the value of the tool in the minds of prospects.

This is a resource that prospects who receive the aforementioned whitepaper would surely find useful, but by reading the whitepaper first, they’ll have a better understanding of the insights the Grader uncovers. The value of the tool (and thus, WordStream) is compounded.

#3: Align Your Messaging Between Platforms

To perform most effectively, you nurture efforts must overlap.

Confused? Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

In this image, AdWords is Tom Brady, Facebook is Randy Moss.

A prospect sees the text ad, clicks it, and downloads the whitepaper. Next, an audience in Facebook comprised exclusively of people who downloaded that whitepaper, are served a hyper-specific Facebook ad that a) addresses the problem identified in the search ad the prospect clicked and b) offers a data-driven solution to that problem.

Tom releases the football, Randy beats the coverage, touchdown.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

By aligning your messaging across platforms, you acknowledge the fact that channels should not exist independent of one another. If you’re paying to advertise to your prospects, you should use Facebook and AdWords in concert. One nurture strategy, two platforms, more leads.

It’s likely that the people you reach on Facebook are the same people, to some extent or another, that you reach on search. Don’t just berate them with the same messaging. Solve their problems in a way that feels organic.

#4: Ensure Tracking Code(s) Exist and Fire

Nurture is great. It’s fantastic. It’s the key to ensuring a steady stream of eager consumers.

But if you aren’t tracking actions on your website, you’re wasting your time. All the cool stuff we’ve talked about so far? Impossible.

Unless you use something like Google Tag Manager, your landing pages (or, for maximum effect, your whole site) need to feature the requisite tracking code. The code also needs to be tracking the right thing.

Few occurrences in the world of digital advertising are as soul-crushing as the moment you realize an incredible-looking metric is just nonsense inflated by improper tracking.

Let’s take a quick look at how the tracking code differs across AdWords, Facebook, and Google Analytics.

AdWords Tracking Code

I suggest using GA to track your AdWords conversions, but the tags you can generate in AdWords work just fine. All you need to do here is define the parameters for your conversion and then paste the code onto your landing page. Simple enough.

Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is a little more nuanced. You can optimize it for almost any type of on-site action.

Put this all over your website, tweaking the constituent components as needed. If on some pages you’re tracking conversions as revenue and on others, email addresses, you’ll want to distinguish the difference here to avoid conflating data.

PROTIP: Download the Facebook pixel Helper from Chrome; it’s a plugin that can let you know when things are working (and when they aren’t)

Google Analytics UA Code

You probably already have Google Analytics code on your site. This is what the majority of people use to track organic metrics.

It’s also extremely useful for developing laser-focused remarketing lists and, broadly speaking, understanding how prospects navigate to, on, and from your website. You can use this information to inform your nurture funnel (if site traffic seems to flow from one page to another with frequency, a repackaged version of that second page might make for some nice gated content).

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

Without tracking—of conversions, prospects, their actions, etc.—it’s impossible to develop an understanding of whether your business is having success on a given channel, let alone scaffold a killer nurture funnel.

You’re lighting money on fire.

That being said, if all of these funny little snippets of code are inciting nervous sweats, fret not: WordStream has a unified pixel (one snippet doing all the work) and an implementation team to help you get started

#5: Cultivate Smarter Remarketing Lists

Remarketing can be tactless nurture through brute force. This is bad remarketing.

Between AdWords and Facebook, remarketing can also be the most powerful nurture tool available to your business.

You just need to get granular. No more targeting “All Site Traffic.” Infer intent from on-site behavior and be your prospects’ problem solver through pertinent creative.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

When you create extremely segmented remarketing lists, you give your business the opportunity to show prospects ad creative that comes pretty damn close to addressing their needs.

If all you know about me is that I’m 26, I live in Boston, and I visited your website last week, you’re going to be stuck showing me generic creative.

BUT:

If you know that I visited a specific set of pages on your website for a specific amount of time, you can infer that I’ve got some degree of interest in that service or offering. This information allows you to advertise to me on both AdWords and Facebook, leveraging different types of creative to show me, your prospect, that your offering is the one for me.

This is far more likely to work than stalking potential customers for weeks with a generic banner ad that flashes your brand name between bits of clip art, I assure you.

#6: Implement IF Functions in Your Ad Copy

Per Google, “IF functions allow you to insert a specific message in your text ads when a condition is met, and a default text when it does not.” This gives you the ability to tailor your ad copy based on either device or audience, ensuring a hyper-relevant message is served to your prospects.

If you typically have trouble converting users on mobile devices, sweeten your offering to prospects searching on their celly.

I can’t imagine a better tool for your nurture funnel than ads capable of changing on the fly to meet the needs of your prospects. Can you?

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

You’re a savvy online retailer who uses remarketing to great effect; you know that cart abandoners—people who come to your site, fill a cart, and leave before completing their purchase— are an incredibly valuable audience. This week you decide to offer 10% off everything on your site, and you advertise accordingly in your AdWords account.

By using IF functions, you can ensure that cart abandoners, people mere clicks from making a purchase, see a “limited,” “exclusive,” or otherwise irresistible offer of 15% off plus free shipping. The uninitiated (everyone else) will see your standard 10%-off sale, but these incredibly valuable prospects will be faced with an offer they simply can’t say no to.

#7: Cap the Number of Times Your Remarketing Ads Appear

“What’s frequency capping.” – most advertisers.

Showing prospects banners depicting the relatively affordable mid-sized sedan, organic catnip, or fur vest you’re trying to sell is an okay tactic; overdoing it, less so. As such, when you decide to use remarketing, pay attention to frequency capping.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

Now, “the right frequency cap” is subjective and largely depends on industry and average buying cycle. For smaller purchases, things people buy impulsively or without much research, showing ads in short succession within a few hours/days of a site visit is expected. On the other end of the spectrum, big ticket items, ones that might take weeks or months of research before a prospect is comfortable pulling the trigger, take more tact.

Reminders over time across search, display, Facebook, and the inbox give prospects ample opportunity to take advantage of your nurture offerings without feeling frustrated.

To develop an understanding of how often your creative is served to potential customers, look at your reach metrics. These can be found at the campaign level in AdWords and will give you an idea as to how often unique users have seen your ads over the designated period.

#8: Push Leads Down the Funnel with Facebook

Facebook’s pixel allows advertisers to do some awesome things in terms of segmenting their various offerings. As a result, in the event you don’t do any advertising on AdWords, you can still flesh out an unreal nurture funnel using just Facebook.

In addition to improving the experience of the prospects, this strategy also lowers CPA for the advertiser. Because you’re showing the ad with the more advanced offering to a smaller audience made up of prospects who are ready for that offering, the chance of conversion is greater.

By creating custom audiences, you can leverage data from the Pixel to ensure the most relevant ad and offering are served to a prospect. I mentioned this earlier when discussing finding the right ad format. Now let’s tackle custom audience creation.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

Creating custom audiences in Facebook allows you to replicate the stages of your nurture funnel within Facebook.

In the example below, I’ve illustrated exactly how this works.

A prospect sees an ad for the Performance Grader on Facebook, clicks it, and runs the grader. That prospect is now a member of a new audience; let’s call this group “Grader Run.” Thanks to our custom audience, the prospect will no longer be served ads for the Performance Grader. Instead, they’re driven to a free trial: a logical, value-driven progression towards the end goal of becoming the next great WordStream customer.

#9: Leverage Exclusionary Audiences

Exclusionary audiences are the backbone of some of the other techniques and tips I’ve touched on today, so it makes sense they make an appearance on the list.

As the name indicates, they’re the audience equivalent of negative keywords. They allow you to segment the groups of prospects you’re targeting by using membership in the other groups of prospects you’re targeting as the distinguishing feature.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

Great question.

Let’s say I have a 60-day remarketing audience and a 90-day remarketing audience, and I have different offerings for each audience.

Exclusionary audiences allow me to show a different ad / offering to each of the two groups even though those prospects in the 90-day audience are members of the 60-day audience, too. They won’t see the 60-day offer; instead, they’ll only ever see the offer that’s exclusive to the 90-day audience: The offer tailored to those prospects.

Worth noting: you can use this technique to exclude other types of audiences, like previous purchasers, as well.

#10: Use Lookalikes and Similar Audiences to Fill Your Funnel with Better Prospects

What’s better than attempting to convey the value of your product or service to total strangers on the internet?

Attempting to convey the value of your business or service to total strangers who bear a striking resemblance to your existing customers, that’s what!

Lookalikes (Facebook) and Similar Audiences (AdWords) allow you to leverage existing audience and customer data to discover new prospects who being.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

The battle-tested nurture program you’ve developed to turn the uninitiated into evangelists should have no problem turning warmed leads into paying customers.

In AdWords, you can use audiences similar to your existing remarketing lists as either a mode of targeting or a simple bid adjustment. On Facebook, things get a little more interesting.

From a single seed audience, Facebook allows you to create multiple Lookalikes based on degree of similarity.

You can use the degree of similarity in your newly created lookalike audiences to determine where you believe new prospects fall in your nurture funnel and drop them in accordingly. Through trial and error, you’ll be able to hone the creation and nurture of these audiences, affording your business a steady stream of nearly interested potential customers.

#11: Create Dynamic Remarketing to Convert Cart Abandoners

If keyword research and audience definition are what funnels solid prospects into your, uh, funnel, Dynamic Remarketing is what pushes those prospects over the goal line.

When the shoes you just looked at on Amazon follow you around online in perpetuity, that’s Dynamic Remarketing. Is it frustrating? It can be. Does it work? [begrudgingly] yes.

How Does It Help Me Nurture Prospects?

If you run an ecommerce outfit and some of these strategies didn’t hit home, this is the one for you. Just don’t go overboard.

As a rule, use Dynamic Remarketing for cart abandoners.

Experience doesn’t get more tailored than advertising to a prospect using everything in their abandoned shopping cart as ad creative. You can use to on both AdWords and Facebook to amplify urgency. Executed correctly (within minutes, hours, maybe days of a prospect abandoning a cart), Dynamic Remarketing will create conversions.

11 Tips to Turn Prospects Into Customers: TL;DR Edition

You’re welcome.

1. Keyword Research + Audience Definition = Formula for Success
2. Find the Right Ad Format for Your Offering
3. Align Your Messaging Between Platforms
4. Ensure Tracking Code(s) Exist and Fire
5. Cultivate Smarter Remarketing Lists
6. Implement IF Functions in Your Ad Copy
7. Cap the Number of Times Your Remarketing Ads Appear
8. Push Leads Down the Funnel with Facebook
9. Leverage Exclusionary Audiences
10. Use Lookalikes and Similar Audiences to Fill Your Funnel with Better Prospects
11. Create Dynamic Remarketing to Convert Cart Abandoners

How you decide to invest in marketing channels can make or break your business.

That sounds like an obvious statement, but not a lot of people think about it critically. Rather, marketers get trapped in the fervent anxiety of needing to be everywhere at once. This is both ineffective and stressful.

It doesn’t help that there’s a new blog post out every day about how you’re missing out on [X] and this company is killing it by doing [Y]. FOMO is real.

Okay, so it’s important to capitalize on effective channels that are conducive to growth at scale. How does one do that, though? Do you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, or is there a process?

An Overview of Common Digital Marketing Channels

First, let’s lay the landscape for the marketing channels most companies are using for growth, as well as which companies are capitalizing on these channels.

Not all of these will work for your business, but it helps to know what’s out there when determining a marketing strategy.

Note: if you’re pretty experienced in marketing, you can just skip the channels below (unless you want a refresher). It’s going to be an overview, and if you’re just interested in testing and exploring new channels, jump to the section below.

Paid Acquisition

You’re undoubtedly familiar with paid acquisition, as it’s the digital equivalent of traditional advertising. You have traffic, and I pay for placement in front of your audience. This is generally split into two areas, though they’re often used together to some varying proportion:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Social and Display Ads

Search engine marketing is intent-based keyword bidding on search networks such as Google Adwords and Microsoft Bing. Marketers spend a ton of money on search ads, and as you can assume, Google owns a large part of the market. SEM is great because you can capture people as they’re searching for a solution, which is often some of the highest intent traffic you can find.

Then there’s the social and display side, often deemed as higher funnel than intent-based search ads. Though, increasingly, you can target with great granularity (especially on social) and set up custom audiences to create a holistic full-funnel paid strategy. In addition, display allows you to target niche audiences based on interests. For instance, you can advertise on specific subreddits, which are sometimes incredibly cohesive tribes:

If you can make the math work on paid advertising, it’s in infinitely scalable channel. This usually means you have a high lifetime value and it’s relatively cheap to acquire customers. If that’s the case, and it’s cheaper for you to acquire customers than what they’re worth to you, it’s a feedback loop you can continue to invest in.

SEO

Google gets over 40,000 search queries per second (on average), which translates to 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year.

Do you think you could turn some of those queries into customers?

For specific businesses, particularly those in spaces where there is a naturally high volume of bottom-of-the-funnel searches (like Yelp, Airbnb, Indeed, or Thumbtack), SEO is an obvious choice. Content sites are also naturally great sites for SEO (we get a large part of our traffic from organic searches).

Once you’ve put in the work, you continue to reap the rewards. With paid acquisition, if you cut off the flow of investment, you cut off the flow of customers. SEO is a long-term play, which is a benefit in a way, but it also makes it hard to experiment and know if it’s working in any short time frame.

Of course, the “O” in SEO stands for optimization, so ongoing maintenance increases the effectiveness of this as a channel.

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Email Marketing

I’m not aware of any companies who aren’t doing email marketing, at least in some way or another. There are many who aren’t doing it well, but to me it seems this is a natural extension of any other acquisition channel, and a super important lever for retention and relationship building.

Email is absolutely still one of the best ways to convert new prospects while retaining and engaging existing customers when it’s personalized.

Some businesses are built on the back of email. For example, Groupon wouldn’t be a company without email marketing:

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I’d also consider other triggered communications like push and text notifications in this category.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a centralized channel that also has overlap with others, such as SEO, social media, and public relations. It is essentially the creation and sharing of online content that seeks to educate, inform, and entertain potential customers throughout the funnel.

This article – the one you’re reading – is a form of content marketing. How meta!

This is, of course, an effective channel for us (or we wouldn’t do it). Others have had success with content, too, such as Kissmetrics, HubSpot, Crazy Egg, and Buffer.

Content marketing is kind of a wide field. It’s sometimes not entirely clear where content marketing starts and where SEO or PR end. For instance, Mint’s early acquisition strategy was targeting blogs for guest posting, mentions, and sometimes paid appearances. So is this content marketing? Who knows. But it was effective.

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Content won’t work for every business, and don’t let those selling content marketing services and software try to convince you it will, but it does work more often than not for companies that do it right. Especially if you’re in the “marketers selling marketing to other marketers” space, it’s quite easy to get links, readers, leads, and ROI from content.

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There are the tangible benefits of leads, but there are the intangible benefits of developing as an industry thought leader and proving your knowledge, making it easier to build partnerships, find customers, and build out other channels (such as sales).

Virality and Referral

Virality is the key lever of many of the most famous growth examples: Dropbox, Uber, Facebook, Hotmail. So, clearly it’s successful if you can make it work.

Just think about it. If, for every customer you acquire, you can acquire 1-10 more with viral loops, you can spend a lot more on acquiring that first customer, right?

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That’s the dream. In reality, viral marketing tends to only work really well for a few types of companies, and usually referral ends up being an effective yet much smaller part of someone’s growth strategy.

Sales

If you can make sales work, this is another eminently scalable channel for startups. Of course, at the start it is anything but scalable – it tends to be the founders cold calling and pitching.

This, too, though is worthwhile, as it’s some of the best feedback and early validation you’ll ever get.

For certain businesses, though – usually B2B with a high enough price tag and lifetime value – sales is a must. I can’t think of many successful companies who don’t incorporate sales at some point in their growth.

Business Development & Partnerships

Whether it’s building integrations with popular technology, co-branding marketing materials, or striking mutually beneficial deals with large companies, it’s clear that business development and partnerships can be viable growth channels.

It’s rare that partnerships are a company’s sole or highest performing channel, but sometimes the rare partnership with Google or Microsoft will lift a startup to the top of the world. Additionally, some companies have partnerships and integrations baked into their offering, like Segment and Zapier.

Emerging Channels

If you can jump on an emerging channel, you have a clear advantage. Especially if you’re a startup with an uphill battle against entrenched competitors with size and money advantages, being scrappy and finding underutilized or new channels is your lifeblood.

It’s also fun being on the cutting edge. Not only that, all of the stable channels we rely on for growth now were once novel and emerging channels.

Here’s how Alice Default, PM at Microsoft, put it:

Alice Default:

“Just like Facebook and Twitter were new emerging channels a few years ago, Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, and mobile apps in general are becoming channels of acquisition for companies. Engineer marketing (like tool-building) is also starting to grow as a channel, as well as events or non-regular PR.

Choosing these channels to push your growth is definitely taking a bigger risk than choosing any other “classic” channel. But if you bet on the right ones, it might pay off in the end, especially if the channel takes off and you’re one of the early adopters.”

As a growth marketer, you have to be on the constant lookout for new trends and marketing opportunities. Keep an eye towards AR and VR and the corresponding applications, as well as any new or niche advertising opportunities.

Most Common Mistake: Spreading Yourself Too Thin

Channel overload – are you overwhelmed? Don’t be. You don’t need to go all out in all of these channels. Unless you’re at a certain threshold in your company’s growth, it’s not smart to invest in too many channels at once.

Of course, you can dabble and experiment with different channels. But the biggest mistake is thinking you should be in all places at all times.

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It’s very likely that your marketing will work on a power law, where a few channels drive almost all of the results. It’s your job to find these channels and exploit them and optimize them to tap their full potential.

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You know that multitasking is bad for your productivity. Well, it’s also usually a bad idea when it comes to marketing strategy. In general, really nailing one or a few marketing channels will beat being mediocre in many places.

How to Start Choosing and Experimenting with Marketing Channels

As I’ll reiterate, your marketing strategy will change with the stages of your company. At the beginning, it’s very likely you’ll be worried more about traction than scale.

How do you get started and pick your first real marketing channel?

As Sophia Eng put it in our growth marketing certification program:

Sophia Eng:

“Take a look at each channel, and first decide if your audience uses it. For example, SEO is a great place to start for many companies. Especially if there is already an audience for what you’re selling, or you can steal search traffic from competitors, you can make this work for you.

How do you know if SEO is even worth exploring? Keyword research. If you find that the volume is high enough for your specific market, and especially for the more bottom-of-funnel keywords, it can be an explosive and long term growth strategy.

Take this sense of pre-exploration research to each channel, and think about it logically. If you sell shoes, would virality work for you? Maybe not. But if you’re building a fitness tracking app, it might. Selling fashion apparel? Maybe webinars and content aren’t the best channel for you, but maybe you can make paid acquisition work. Research where your ideal customers hang out and reach them there.”

You can start to get a feel for the landscape by looking at your competitors and seeing what they’re doing. Use tools like SpyFu, Ahrefs, SEMrush, to get a quantitative look at their SEO and PPC strategies. You can do a lot of qualitative competitive analysis, too.

Past that, though, you’ll want to use the Bullseye Framework (from Traction), which consists of 5 steps:

• Brainstorm
• Rank
• Prioritize
• Test
• Focus

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So brainstorm a few tactics for each channel (don’t shy away from channels you think won’t work), rank and prioritize them (usually with “effort” and “potential”), run small scale experiments, and focus on the one that works.

Sounds simple enough, right? It’s basically the application of agile marketing and experimentation to channels themselves, rather than just the website or product.

There many frameworks out there for how to double down on channels and pick them for the long term. Here’s what I like to follow…

Choosing Growth Channels: ROI & Scale

How do you know a channel works for you? If you have high ROI and the channel is scalable.

Brian Balfour asks a good question in this video: are you looking for traction channels or growth channels?

They’re not necessarily the same thing, though they sound synonymous.

You can find traction doing things that don’t scale – writing guest posts, cold emailing potential users, engaging potential users on forums – to validate initial assumptions and aid early product and market development. But to choose a growth channel, you need to weigh two factors:

• What’s the ROI?
• Does it scale?

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According to Andrew Chen, there are only a few channels with which you can scale a startup:

• Paid acquisition.
• Virality.
• SEO.
• Sales.
• Other (such as the rare partnership with Microsoft or Oracle that propels a startup to the top).

What all of these channels have in common is that they’re feedback loops (you can continue to pour fuel into the fire and achieve compound growth instead of linear), and they have a high ceiling for saturation (there’s a lot of room to grow and scale this channel).

Boris Wertz narrows it down to two levers that allow high growth:

• Your business has a high Lifetime Value (LTV) per user. This allows you to spend a lot on customer acquisition.
• Your business has a high viral co-efficient (or a network effect) that lets you acquire users cheaply without worrying much about revenue per user or cost per user.

You can imagine a company like Workday or Bounce X for the first one. A customer is worth a lot to them, and I’d wager they don’t have high churn.

And you can imagine a Dropbox or a Tinder for the second one. Friends tell friends, and you actually get more value out of the product if more of your network is using it, therefore they can multiply their spend by customer referrals.

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These two levers echo what Andrew was trying to say and what I mentioned above: to scale, you must choose channels with ROI and with the ability to scale.

What to Do When a Channel “Clicks”

When a channel works for you, throw more resources at it.

Redesignate budget from channels that are not performing as well. Share the data with the other teams and help them understand the performance of the channels.

Of course, continue to monitor the performance regularly as competitors may bid up the cost of the keywords, or you may begin to face audience fatigue (ads become less effective with time and repeated exposure, usually).

If your ROI is slipping, consider modifying your strategy and always be testing and innovatingse. Not all channels can scale up and maintain their ROI. Tactics and channels evolve (as you can see below):

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Only One Channel vs. Barbell Strategy

As mentioned, it’s important to focus and not to overexert yourself and spread yourself too thin. But does that mean you only need to focus on one channel? Some think so.

As Justin Mares writes, “At any stage in a startup’s lifecycle, one traction channel dominates in terms of customer acquisition. That is why we suggest focusing on one at a time, and only after you’ve identified a channel that seems like it could actually work.”

I, however, believe there are interactions between channels that, while hard to quantify, produce better results when combined than when isolated. To be fair, I’ve done a fair amount of attribution modeling and have worked for only a few companies, but it’s hard to imagine only focusing on one channel at a time. We at CXL certainly spend the majority of our time on 1-2 channels. But we leave room to experiment with other strategies and emerging channels.

Which brings me to what Andrew Chen calls the Barbell Strategy. This is where you balance the channels you know you can acquire customers with and the channels that are moonshot growth opportunities but are harder to predict:

Andrew Chen:

“Do the methods that don’t scale

During the early days, by all means, sign up friends and family. And get those blog mentions, and do all the content marketing you can handle. That’ll help create a base of engaged users, while you hit product/market fit. At each point, as what works caps out, go after the next marketing channel that can drive incrementally more users. In the early days, perhaps a contest partnership with a niche blog would do, but after a while, maybe you’d hire a small team to author long-term content marketing pieces to circulate.

Invest in moonshots

The other end of the barbell, the high-risk/high-reward projects, should be taken with deliberate projects and analysis. If you need your userbase to generate a lot more unique content for SEO, start fiddling around with features that reward long-form content. And start tracking what % of users write great content. And start making the small changes needed for Google to index your site. After a few months of this, you can start to understand what it would take to create enough pieces of unique content to make an SEO strategy work. You can usually work this kind of thing out on a spreadsheet.

Balancing between the two

It’s important to balance these short-term and long-term efforts. If all you do is work on nonscalable marketing methods, then inevitably the channels will tap out and your growth will slow. When you see the startups that are highly dependent on press hits for their traction, but seem anemic otherwise, this is exactly what’s happening.”

This is the strategy investors use to mitigate losses while still opening up opportunities for exponential returns.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of thought that goes into choosing the right marketing channels, and rightly so: it can make or break your business.

It depends on a lot of factors: the team, the product, the stage of the company, the market. But there are a few tenets that we repeatedly find to be true in choosing and scaling channels:

• Choose channels with high ROI that have the ability to scale.
• Focus on few channels rather than spreading yourself too thin.
• Adapt and experiment. Channels and their effectiveness change.
• Look for emerging channels. The blue ocean is where you can find cheap customers at scale and beat your larger competitors.